canned-prompts/workplans/CANP-WP-0002-format-open-questions.md

id	type	title	domain	repo	status	owner	topic_slug	created	updated	reviewed_at	reviewed_by	context_paths	state_hub_workstream_id
CANP-WP-0002	workplan	Resolve CPF v0.1 open questions promoted for v0.2	agents	canned-prompts	proposed	codex	practice	2026-09-06	2026-09-06	2026-09-06	claude	INTENT.md CannedPromptFormat-v0.1.md reference/canned_prompts.py examples/pqrst-estimate/	c87c8e27-8b11-5306-b687-86779ef3f1be

Resolve CPF v0.1 open questions promoted for v0.2

CannedPromptFormat-v0.1.md § 23 currently lists twelve items as "experience should determine". A review of the seed on 2026-09-06 (spec + reference CLI + examples/pqrst-estimate; 3/3 tests pass, full local lifecycle smokes clean) plus an operator interview promoted five of them from "wait and see" to "decide, with a stated leaning". This workplan carries those decisions.

Unpromoted § 23 items stay deferred and unchanged: content macros, cryptographic integrity/signing, model capability vocabularies, run manifests and evidence formats, deterministic compilation manifests, trust/reputation signals, federated discovery, richer template syntax.

Guardrail for every task below: INTENT.md § Deliberate boundary. The format may declare a requirement; it must not specify the resolver, runtime, or execution engine that satisfies it.

Optional inputs need defaults

id: CANP-WP-0002-T01
status: done
priority: high
state_hub_task_id: "e49bf036-0aee-5bb2-abbd-3d3f683df298"

Gap found in review. Rendering rule § 5.1(4) makes any unresolved placeholder an error, and § 6 gives inputs no default field. An input declared required: false and referenced from the template therefore makes render fail unless a value is supplied — optional inputs are effectively unusable. The spec's own § 4 manifest example hits this with repository_context. reference/canned_prompts.py is conformant here; the defect is in the spec.

Decision (operator, 2026-09-06): add a default field to inputs, and allow that default to be either

• a static value, or
• a derived default — a prompt that produces the value from available context.

Unresolved-with-no-default remains an error.

Design note. § 10 already carried the derivation mechanism: dependencies accepts requirement: generate, defined as "a resolver MAY satisfy a missing dependency by invoking an appropriate generation process", with resolution left undefined. A derived default therefore did not need a new concept, only a binding — the input's default names the dependency, and the dependency records what may be generated and at which version.

Follow-up decisions (operator, 2026-09-06):

• Both declaration forms are allowed. A derived default may reference a declared prompt dependency, or carry an inline prompt. The reference form is preferred and the spec says why (an inline prompt is anonymous — unversioned, unprovenanced, un-evaluable), and a validator SHOULD warn when a published package derives inline. Inline is for local and draft packages.
• Error unless static fallback. A derived default MAY declare a static value. A consumer that does not derive uses it; with no fallback the input stays unresolved, which is an error. Derivation never silently yields empty content.
• Split render from resolve. Resolution decides values and may be non-deterministic; rendering substitutes and always is. Rendering MUST NOT derive. This preserves INTENT success criterion 4 verbatim — no change to INTENT.md was needed.

Work:

Delivered:

1. § 5.1 rewritten as "Resolution and rendering" — six resolution rules and four rendering rules, with rendering explicitly deterministic and forbidden from deriving (rule 10). Resolution must report which values were derived (rule 6). A tool that resolves only supplied values and static defaults is stated to be conforming.
2. § 6 gains default in the field table plus a new § 6.1 covering both declaration forms, the static fallback, and why the reference form is preferred.
3. § 4 manifest surface updated: repository_context — the field that demonstrated the original defect — now carries a derived default with a fallback, backed by a requirement: generate prompt dependency.
4. § 10 states the binding between requirement: generate and a referenced derived default.
5. § 18 gains validation rules 11–13 and the publish-time inline warning.
6. § 19 gains two MUST NOTs: a derived default's prompt text is not an instruction addressed to the consuming tool, and derivation must be visible to the caller.
7. § 21 documents the new resolve verb.
8. reference/canned_prompts.py: Resolution dataclass, resolve_inputs (with resolve_values kept as a wrapper), input_default_kind, prompt_dependency_ids, validate_input_default, a resolve command, and a specific render-time error naming the underivable inputs. Tests: 3 → 11, all passing. Both READMEs document the split.

Registry namespaces and ownership

id: CANP-WP-0002-T02
status: todo
priority: high
state_hub_task_id: "a52cd41e-2bcc-50ee-96a1-d645a06df922"

An id like practice/pqrst-estimate has a namespace prefix with no owner. Two authors publishing practice/… into one registry collide today; add and publish only refuse an exact id@version that already exists.

Decide, for § 3.2 and § 20: what a namespace means, who may claim one, how a filesystem registry records the claim, and what a consumer does on conflict. Leaning: keep v0.1's local-first stance — namespace ownership is a registry policy, declared by the registry rather than by the package — so package semantics do not change when a hosted registry appears later. Signing and trust scoring stay out of scope (§ 23, INTENT non-goals).

Prompt composition and inheritance

id: CANP-WP-0002-T03
status: todo
priority: high
state_hub_task_id: "0505c790-e57e-568c-9c8c-376957c9b08e"

Largest gap between INTENT.md and the spec. Principle 9 ("composition without capture") and the dependencies.prompts field both promise composition, but v0.1 defines no mechanism — dependencies is a declared field with no semantics.

T01 has since settled one corner of this: a derived default binds an input to a prompt dependency declared requirement: generate, so package-to-package reference already exists for that one case. Build on it rather than around it.

Decide what composition means at the artifact level: how one package references another, whether references are includes, extends, or plain declared prerequisites, and how versions are pinned. Leaning: declaration only — a package states what it needs, and resolution stays with the consumer, per the INTENT boundary. Do not introduce range resolution (INTENT non-goal).

Canonical eval schemas

id: CANP-WP-0002-T04
status: todo
priority: medium
state_hub_task_id: "0daf1097-6599-563f-8965-739cbc874ddf"

Cheapest item to pin down. evals/ is a reserved path and evals: is a manifest list, but § 12 defines no schema, so an eval file is an unvalidated blob that no tool can act on.

Define a minimal eval-spec schema: identity, what is being asserted, the fixture it runs against, and how a result is reported. Keep it declarative and engine-neutral — "universal prompt evaluation" is an explicit INTENT non-goal, so this specifies the file, not an evaluation engine. Extend § 18 to validate eval files that declare the schema, and add one eval to examples/pqrst-estimate as a worked case.

Typed context and dependency contracts

id: CANP-WP-0002-T05
status: todo
priority: medium
state_hub_task_id: "5beec7ba-e6c9-58b1-a065-b06aba015034"

dependencies.context and dependencies.capabilities appear in the § 4 manifest surface with no semantics whatsoever in v0.1, and § 9 compatibility.capabilities overlaps them without a stated relationship.

Decide: what a context dependency declares, how it differs from an input, how it relates to compatibility.capabilities, and whether capability names are free strings in v0.2 (model capability vocabularies stay deferred). T01 is now settled and partly answers this: a derived default is a consumer-resolved context requirement expressed through dependencies.prompts rather than through dependencies.context. Decide whether context is still a distinct concept or collapses into the prompt-dependency mechanism.

Rewrite specification section 23

id: CANP-WP-0002-T06
status: todo
priority: medium
state_hub_task_id: "06032689-fc19-5fcd-a76e-5dbc87d02cd4"

After T01–T05 land, replace § 23's flat twelve-item list with two sections: questions being decided for v0.2 (each with its scoped question and stated leaning, referencing this workplan) and questions still deferred (the eight unpromoted items listed at the top of this file). Bump the spec status line if the format revision warrants it.

Reference implementation conformance fixes

id: CANP-WP-0002-T07
status: todo
priority: low
state_hub_task_id: "f642abe6-8222-5958-88ee-7a53454f2344"

Two defects found in the same review, independent of the format questions:

1. Prerelease versions sort as newest. parse_semver in reference/canned_prompts.py returns (major, minor, patch, raw_string), so 1.0.0-rc1 and 1.0.0 tie on the numeric fields and then compare as strings — "1.0.0-rc1" > "1.0.0". resolve_installed with no --version therefore selects a prerelease over its own release. Order prerelease below release, or state in § 17 that v0.1 ignores prerelease ordering.
2. copy_immutable copies everything. add/publish use shutil.copytree over the whole source directory, so a stray .git, .venv, or scratch file lands in the catalog and registry. § 2 says tools MUST ignore unknown non-reserved files unless a manifest field references them. Decide whether packaging is reserved-paths-only or an explicit ignore list, then align the implementation and § 2.