Define a portable evidence-directed autonomy contract

[devantler]

🤖 Generated by the Agentic Engineer

Problem

The portable Agentic Engineer role can consume a deployment contract, but it does not yet have a first-class way to distinguish protected authority from measurable outcomes and replaceable methods. Consumers therefore tend to encode current procedures as permanent instructions, and every new deployment must choose between rigidity and unsafe ambiguity.

Proposed direction

Define a tool-neutral evidence-directed autonomy contract for the canonical Agentic Engineer entrypoint.

A consuming deployment declares protected invariants and outcome contracts. Everything explicitly classified as a replaceable default may be challenged only through the proof protocol linked from the parent Epic. Missing, malformed, contradictory, stale, or unenforceable declarations fail closed to the current behavior.

The shipped default remains conservative and backward-compatible: installing or upgrading the plugin must not silently broaden an existing consumer’s authority.

Acceptance criteria

• Specify the portable contract for protected invariants, outcome contracts, replaceable defaults, proof status, evidence expiry, and fallback.
• Make authority ownership explicit; an agent cannot self-reclassify an invariant or convert UNKNOWN into permission.
• Define how consumer facts, portable role behavior, and runtime enforcement remain separate and provenance-linked.
• Preserve the existing behavior for consumers that have not opted into and completed the new contract.
• Fail closed when classification, evidence, enforcement, or a required deployment fact cannot be resolved.
• Define capability-scoped autonomy so one successful experiment cannot grant unrelated powers.
• Support automatic contraction to the last proven method when evidence expires or an outcome floor regresses.
• Cover the contract with positive and negative tests, including attempted self-authorization, stale proof, missing runtime enforcement, and contradictory consumer declarations.
• Document the contract for all supported runtimes without giving provider or model names implicit capability.
• Bump and validate the agentic-engineering plugin version so existing consumers can actually receive the change.

Compatibility and safety

This work changes how methods may evolve; it does not grant spend, security, production, destructive-action, lifecycle, disclosure, or external-commitment authority. Those remain consumer-owned and fail closed.

Rough size: L.

Part of devantler-tech/monorepo#3403. Related to #51 and #76.