Work record / Health and wellness / Ground Truth Peptides

Ground Truth Peptides: a site that earns its grades

Almost everyone writing about peptides is selling them, so I built the reference I wished had existed. It has run publicly since June 2026.

The seat

I am the builder and owner of Ground Truth Peptides. I started the build in June 2026 and it is still going.

What I was brought in to decide

Nearly everything written about peptides comes from a seller: a vendor, an affiliate, or a clinic with a program to fill. What independent material there was ran thin, or came with vendor discount codes attached. Even the nearest independent profile site carried those codes. The nearest direct competitor, Reptides, is a wiki behind a login and a paywall, around seventy dollars a year. Neither one grades its evidence. Neither separates scientific support from real-world signal. Neither says what it would take to verify a claim.

I came to peptides late and skeptical. I talked to my physician, ran every blood test I could, read everything I could find, and spoke with nearly every peptide source in Phoenix. It still went wrong. What followed was roughly two months of studying, stopping, restarting and guessing. The likeliest culprit was a contaminated vial of bacteriostatic water. Everything gets mixed with that liquid, and nobody thinks about it. That was the price of guessing.

So I built the thing I wished I had found. I built Ground Truth Peptides together with Dr. Matt Zanis, PT, DPT, FAAOMPT, owner of Rooted in MVMNT. He is a Duke-trained doctor of physical therapy and a fellowship-trained manual therapist, with a contract advisory role with US Olympic organizations. Matt needed somewhere to send his own clients for accurate, current peptide research, kept apart from anything he or Common Ground sells. The site gives him a page of his own as a lead contributor, but he is not on the homepage and the site does not present him as a peptide authority.

What we did

• Using parallel research workflows, with as many as 19 agents in a run, I built 42 graded compound profiles. The output goes to JSON and scripts reshape it into typed data, so the catalog can be reproduced and is not typed by hand.
• The grading model I designed has four lenses, each answered separately, with a plain word beside every letter. The questions are whether the science backs it, whether real people feel it, whether it is safe, and whether it could be placebo. Nothing collapses into a single score. A fifth axis, legal access, runs across eight tiers from FDA-approved to research-only. It sits outside the Ground Truth Score, so a vote cannot move a grade.
• The grade-does-not-move rule was tested in July 2026, when an FDA advisory committee voted to recommend six peptides for the 503A Bulks List. Between July 22 and July 25 the evidence stayed the same. A scientific review published alongside the vote called human safety data insufficient and said immunogenicity risk had not been assessed. I moved no grade. As of October 3 the FDA had proposed no rule covering any of the six, so the rule held.
• I built the Truth Tracker. A user uploads a blood panel or DEXA scan, Claude reads each measured value into structured rows, and results are stored per user with row-level security. Reading a 79-marker blood panel costs about 34 cents.
• I built a daily news sweep. Each day at 13:00 UTC, Claude runs a web search for new peptide developments. Everything it finds lands as a pending proposal, and a human has to review it at the gated desk page before anything goes live.
• I also built /plan, a protocol cost estimator and dosing sheet with no checkout. /testable is a hub on verifiability: for each of the 42 compounds it shows what a lab can confirm, and for about two-thirds of them no lab can tell you they are working. Ask Ground Truth draws only on the graded corpus, cites the grade and the source, and declines to give prescriptive dosing.
• I fixed two defects. The first was a Supabase row-level security gap. Its newer publishable API keys never map requests to the anonymous role, so I added a SECURITY DEFINER function that takes a batch, forces every row to pending and avoids the problem. The second was a client-side data leak, where internal vendor fields sat in the planning page's JavaScript bundle without ever being displayed. I strip them on the server so that a regression would fail to compile.
• I added the Common Ground credit, footer module and structured data, and rechecked regulatory status through October 3. All six PCAC compound profiles moved to past tense on legal status. I removed Google Analytics and 493 em dashes, and closed the API and both gated pages to crawlers.

Results

• groundtruthpeptides.com has been live and public since June 24, 2026. It carries 42 graded compounds and 77 URLs in the live sitemap. There are 7 API routes and 52 products in the planning tool, with 29 monitored sources and 11 commits across the history.
• The graded index and grade board are live, with Ask Ground Truth, the Truth Tracker (signup open after a private beta), /testable and /plan. So are the reconstitution calculator, a dosing hub and a blends page, plus a genome page. The rest is expert track records, five sourced posts, and a news feed that runs current to October 3.
• Its first major regulatory event was the July 2026 FDA advisory committee vote on seven peptides, and not one grade moved. Had the site raised six grades in July, it would be explaining itself as of October 3.
• It is free forever, with no store, no vendor money, no paid tier and no affiliate link. One vendor kickback would destroy what makes the site worth anything.

Public record

• Ground Truth Peptides

Firm record

Common Ground keeps its own account of this engagement: Ground Truth Peptides on the Common Ground wiki.

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