# 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 in the NetKingdom security layer model. 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.

> **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 conformance states and gap register,
ops-warden's delegated lanes, kings-guard's advisory-until-gaps-close posture,
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. If a level
determines an outcome it reaches `access-engine` as an input claim, never by a
consumer branching on a fetched level. Compiled data that determines an outcome
is still deciding.

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.

See [INTENT.md](INTENT.md).