maturity-engine/README.md

# maturity-engine

**Computes, deterministically, how far a thing has progressed against declared
criteria and submitted evidence — and keeps the history of that progression.**

An Engine (PIP) in the NetKingdom security layer model v0.7. Given the same
criteria and the same evidence it returns the same level; that property is
what makes it an engine rather than an opinion. It supplies facts a decision
consumes as claims. It does not decide.

> **gate-house judges and proposes. maturity-engine computes and remembers.**

It exists because NetKingdom is full of maturity that nothing owns — the Canon's
ASM-0…ASM-6 ladder, the layer model's four conformance states and gap register,
ops-warden's delegated lanes, kings-guard's advisory-until-gaps-close posture,
PEP stance maps parked in the statute, the State Hub's DoX quality debt — and
because `gate-house` was catalogued as owning conformance review with no engine
to act through, the same defect kings-guard found for containment.

**Guardrail:** a maturity level must never gate a decision directly, and must
never be compiled into registry content. If a level determines an outcome it
reaches `access-engine` as an input claim or a versioned policy rule, never by
a consumer branching on a fetched level. Compiled data that determines an
outcome is still deciding.

**Scoring:** blocked-clean MUST NOT rank below conforming.

Maturity here is graded, evidence-based, open-ended, and revisable — levels can
fall when evidence expires. The closed, binary, replay-proof state machine of an
approval belongs to `approval-engine`; the two engines are deliberate opposites.

This repository is seeded, not yet an engine surface. See [INTENT.md](INTENT.md)
and [SCOPE.md](SCOPE.md). The work to stand up the surface is `MAT-WP-0001`.