The short version
The Four Pillars, Day Master, hidden stems, Ten Gods and Five Elements structure are calculated by explicit rules. Chart structure, Day Master strength, the Useful Element, seasonal balance and the interpretation built on them depend on a specific analytical framework. Those results represent the framework Destiny Book currently uses; we do not present them as the only correct answer.
1. Chart plotting and interpretation are not the same thing
Destiny Book starts by separating two kinds of content: facts that can be calculated and structured, and content that needs interpretation and judgement.
The Four Pillars, the Day Master, hidden stems, Ten Gods relationships and the Five Elements structure can be calculated by explicit rules. Chart structure, Day Master strength, the Useful Element, seasonal balance and the interpretation built on them depend on a specific analytical framework and method.
That is why we avoid mixing everything into one long text you cannot trace back.
2. Deterministic calculation comes first
Wherever a result can be determined, the underlying system hands it to a program rather than to a language model.
The public mingshu-bazi tool returns the Four Pillars, hidden stems and Ten Gods, Five Elements and Ten Gods weighting, the evidence behind Day Master strength, chart structure, the Useful Element and favorable or cautionary elements, seasonal balance, the 10-year Luck Cycles and other fields as structured data. It also records which time convention was used and which engine version produced the result.
Day Master strength, for example, does not come back as a bare strong or weak label. It comes back with the supporting evidence, such as whether the Day Master has the season, the ground or the support.
The point is not to prove that one framework is the only correct one. It is to make the same rule produce the same result from the same input.
3. Different schools can reach different conclusions
There is no single analytical framework that every BaZi practitioner agrees on.
Day Master strength, chart structure, the Useful Element, seasonal balance and some of the special stars can be read differently by different schools and teachers.
So the relevant results on Destiny Book represent the framework this site currently uses.
The public tool states this explicitly: chart structure, Day Master strength, the Useful Element, favorable and cautionary elements and seasonal balance come from fixed tables belonging to this engine, and may differ from other schools. We think stating the difference plainly matters more than packaging one method as the only standard answer.
4. How knowledge articles are produced
The core knowledge articles are written by hand.
The source material includes traditional BaZi books, modern teaching materials and real cases. The work is not to copy the source text, but to understand it first and then rewrite it in Destiny Book's own structure.
Xiaohe does most of the writing, and Xiaohe and Yuxuan review it together.
Article pages carry the byline and the last update date.
5. Why the CLI is public
We want the judgement capability behind Destiny Book to be directly usable and checkable, so the mingshu-bazi project is public.
The boundary is worth stating clearly: we have not published the source code of the website or of the chart engine. What is public is the CLI tool, the Agent Skill, the interface contract and examples. Through them, anyone can call the same algorithm, get structured chart facts and engine determinations, and check the returned result item by item.
The point is that you do not have to take our word for it. You can run it yourself and look at the output.