Register with State Hub, persist concept assessment, seed first workplan

- history/2026-08-22-concept-assessment-swot.md: SWOT assessment of the
  concept corpus with recommendations for the first workplan
- statehub register: infotech domain, TD-WP prefix, generated AGENTS.md,
  .custodian-brief.md and TD-WP-0001 bootstrap workplan
- .repo-classification.yaml: category research, domain infotech
- SCOPE.md rewritten with real repo boundaries
- TD-WP-0002: vertical spike reordering M0-M10 into one end-to-end thread
  that can falsify the crystallization thesis early
- commit previously untracked INTENT.md and docs/

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

Assistant: claude-code
Assistant-Model: opus
Assistant-Process: 1629012@bnt-lap001
Assistant-Session: 78d4fb13-8a1e-474b-87a3-9b9261c49a39

history/2026-08-22-concept-assessment-swot.md

@@ -0,0 +1,240 @@
+# test-driver — Concept Assessment (SWOT)
+
+**Date:** 2026-08-22
+**Author:** Claude (Opus 5) with Bernd Worsch
+**Scope:** Assessment of the pre-implementation concept corpus — `INTENT.md`,
+`docs/TestDriverConceptModel.md`, `docs/TestDriverImprovementLoop.md`,
+`docs/TestDriverInitialMilestones.md`, `docs/TestDriverResearchPrototype.md`.
+**Repo state at assessment:** 2,950 lines of concept documentation, 1 commit,
+no executable code, `docs/` and `INTENT.md` untracked.
+
+---
+
+## Orientation
+
+The repository is **concept-complete and code-empty**. Four documents describe a
+use-case-driven verification framework whose thesis is that verification should
+mature alongside the behaviour it protects: fluid and agentic while software is
+hot, deterministic once it cools.
+
+The ratio — roughly 3,000 lines of theory against zero lines executable — is the
+single most important fact shaping this assessment.
+
+---
+
+## Strengths
+
+**S1 — The core thesis is original and load-bearing.**
+The crystallization continuum (T0 Exploratory → T5 Deterministic) coupled to
+implementation *Temperature* is not a repackaging of "self-healing tests". It
+makes a falsifiable claim: verification mode should be a function of how fast the
+system under test is changing.
+
+**S2 — The right primitive is identified.**
+`SemanticAction` as the bridge between agentic discovery and deterministic code
+generation is the correct pivot point, and the documents know it.
+`grant_access(Bob, R, READ)` surviving a DOM restructure *is* the product.
+
+**S3 — Safety is designed in, not bolted on.**
+Oracle independence from actors, "implementation is not the truth",
+`INCONCLUSIVE` as a first-class verdict, and **False Adaptation Rate** as the
+headline safety metric. This is what separates the concept from self-healing
+test vendors, which structurally cannot distinguish a moved button from a broken
+authorization check.
+
+**S4 — Falsifiable research posture.**
+H-001…H-005 carry falsification conditions; the lab is a measuring instrument;
+milestone exit criteria are stated as observable outcomes. Most framework
+projects have a roadmap — this has an experiment design.
+
+**S5 — Security-as-mutation is high leverage and cheap.**
+Deriving twelve adversarial variants from one shared-resource use case is
+demonstrable early, valuable independently of the crystallization thesis, and
+requires no maturity beyond T1.
+
+**S6 — Anti-bloat discipline is pre-committed.**
+Explicit non-goal list, M10 Compression Review, "self-improvement includes
+subtraction", and a deliberately boring stack (Python / pytest / Playwright /
+SQLite / YAML). The documents already contain their own best critique.
+
+---
+
+## Weaknesses
+
+**W1 — Concept surface vastly exceeds validated ground.**
+Roughly 40 canonical concepts, of which Energy, Confidence, Metabolism, Campaign
+selection, Retirement floors and Lineage graphs are untestable until M7+. Each is
+an invitation to build now and validate never.
+
+**W2 — Three documents already disagree.**
+`INTENT.md` numbers milestones M0–M3; `TestDriverInitialMilestones.md` numbers
+M0–M10; `TestDriverConceptModel.md` §15 has a third M0–M3. Concept drift has
+appeared before any code exists — precisely the failure mode the Improvement Loop
+document was written to prevent.
+
+**W3 — The three hardest problems are the least specified.**
+(a) How a `SemanticAction` retains *identity* across a changed surface — the
+binding and matching mechanism is nowhere described.
+(b) How adaptation is classified MECHANICAL vs SEMANTIC vs DEFECT without an LLM
+making the call, which principle 2.3 forbids.
+(c) How a captured trajectory becomes deterministic code with oracle coverage
+preserved.
+These three are the project; the remainder is scaffolding.
+
+**W4 — Energy is the weakest concept and the easiest to build.**
+A dangerous combination. Proving that Energy "predicts verification value"
+requires years of history the prototype will never accumulate. M9 exists mainly
+to collect a dataset for a study that will not happen at this stage.
+
+**W5 — The evaluation set is far too small for its claims.**
+Six seeded mutations (M01–M06) cannot support "classification precision/recall".
+Dozens of labelled mutations across several dimensions are needed before any rate
+is more than anecdote.
+
+**W6 — Self-verification is circular.**
+`td://self/oracle-independence` uses the framework to test whether the
+framework's oracles are independent. Without an out-of-band assertion layer
+(plain pytest) as ground truth, M3 proves nothing.
+
+**W7 — No cost or nondeterminism model.**
+Agentic runs are stochastic and expensive. Nothing budgets for model flake,
+retries, or per-run cost — yet "execution cost reduction" is a stated M7 success
+metric.
+
+---
+
+## Opportunities
+
+**O1 — The timing window is open now.**
+Agentic development is outrunning test maintenance in exactly the way the *Why*
+section describes. The pain is acute and current.
+
+**O2 — The lab is a publishable asset in its own right.**
+A benchmark of seeded mechanical / semantic / defect mutations with ground-truth
+labels is something the field lacks entirely. It could earn credibility and
+contributors faster than the framework does, at a fraction of the cost.
+
+**O3 — "False Adaptation Rate" is a naming land-grab.**
+If self-healing test tools come to be held against a metric this project defined,
+the framing is won regardless of adoption.
+
+**O4 — Integration rather than replacement lowers adoption cost to near zero.**
+Crystallization that emits ordinary pytest / Playwright files drops into CI
+systems that already exist. Users can adopt the output without adopting the
+framework — and then adopt the framework to keep producing it.
+
+**O5 — Agent-native distribution.**
+Exposed over MCP, this becomes the verification layer coding agents call on
+themselves — a far larger surface than "a test framework a human runs".
+
+**O6 — A real second system under test is already available.**
+The Custodian ecosystem (multi-domain, cross-repo, permissioned) is a better
+dogfooding target than a toy lab and exercises the multi-user and tenant-boundary
+claims honestly.
+
+---
+
+## Threats
+
+**T1 — One public false adaptation kills the thesis.**
+If the framework ever normalises a genuine authorization defect as a legitimate
+mechanical change, the concept is dead and cannot be rescued by a better version.
+This asymmetry should shape every design decision.
+
+**T2 — The independence problem is philosophically serious.**
+If an agent writes the code, an agent writes the use case, and an agent realises
+the test, then "oracles independent from actors" is procedurally true but
+epistemically thin. Intent artefacts need human or spec-derived provenance, or
+the guarantee is a shell game. This is not addressed anywhere in the documents.
+
+**T3 — Competitors with distribution.**
+Testim / mabl / Functionize on the self-healing axis; agentic QA startups on the
+exploration axis; Playwright plus a competent agent covering the naive 80%. The
+differentiator — defect-vs-adaptation discrimination — must be *demonstrated*,
+not described, and the window is roughly 12–18 months.
+
+**T4 — The economics may not close.**
+If agentic realisation costs more per run than simply asking an agent to rewrite
+the broken test, crystallization becomes an aesthetic preference rather than a
+value proposition. This must be measured early, not at M7.
+
+**T5 — Platform drift before evidence.**
+Eleven milestones, a research control plane, five agentic roles and a ten-
+dimension fitness scorecard — for a project with no runnable code and one
+maintainer.
+
+---
+
+## Recommendations for the first workplan
+
+**R1 — Change the sequence: build a narrow vertical spike, not layered
+milestones.** The documented order (M0 registers → M1 kernel → M2 lab → M3
+self-verification → M4 agentic …) completes four layers before the thesis is
+touched once. Invert it: drive one thread end to end — one use case
+(Alice/Bob/Carol) → deterministic kernel → lab with three mutations (M01 moved
+control, M02 changed DOM, M05 authorization defect) → agentic realisation of
+exactly one semantic action → adaptation classification → one crystallization.
+Thin at every layer, complete end to end. That addresses H-001/H-002/H-003 in one
+workplan instead of seven.
+
+**R2 — Make the classifier the centrepiece, not a downstream milestone.**
+M6 (defect vs adaptation) is where the project either has a reason to exist or
+does not. Design the classification mechanism *first* — specifically, what
+deterministic evidence separates "the button moved" from "Bob can still read
+after revoke". If the honest answer is "an LLM decides", that violates principle
+2.3 and must be resolved on paper before code.
+
+**R3 — Cap M0 at roughly half a day.**
+Five hypothesis files, one fitness map, an ID convention. No CLI, no register
+tooling, no schema. The research control plane is overhead until there are
+readings to record.
+
+**R4 — Defer Energy, Temperature, Confidence, Campaigns and Retirement
+entirely.** Record raw immutable `EnergyEvent`s from day one — they cost nothing
+and cannot be reconstructed later — but implement no scoring, decay or selection
+logic. Each of these is cheap to build, satisfying to build, and impossible to
+validate at this stage.
+
+**R5 — Build the lab larger than feels necessary, and label ground truth.**
+It is the measuring instrument for every claim the project makes; a weak lab caps
+the credibility of all downstream results. Target 15–20 labelled mutations rather
+than 6, each a reproducible toggle with a recorded expected classification. This
+is also O2 — the standalone asset.
+
+**R6 — Establish out-of-band ground truth before self-verification.**
+Write the actor-isolation and oracle-independence checks as plain pytest against
+observable behaviour, outside the framework. Otherwise M3 is a system certifying
+itself.
+
+**R7 — Instrument cost and nondeterminism from the first agentic run.**
+Tokens, wall time, retry count, run-to-run variance per maturity level. T4 is an
+existential economic question; the data is free to collect from run one and
+impossible to backfill.
+
+**R8 — Reconcile the three milestone numberings and commit `docs/`.**
+Pick one canonical sequence and mark the others superseded. Untracked, mutually
+inconsistent design documents are exactly the CONCEPT_DRIFT finding the
+Improvement Loop defines — the project should catch it on itself before it
+catches anything else.
+
+**R9 — Fix a single quantitative gate for the first workplan.**
+Proposed: *agentic realisation recovers from M01 and M02 with zero claim or
+invariant changes, flags M05 as a Product Finding, and produces one deterministic
+test that runs with no model involvement.* Achieving that is worth more than any
+other ten items on the roadmap; failing it is worth knowing early and cheaply.
+
+**R10 — Decide where use-case intent comes from.**
+Record, in the first workplan, whether use cases are human-authored,
+spec-derived, or agent-generated, and what independence guarantee survives in
+each case (T2). This determines whether the central promise is real or
+procedural — a paragraph of thinking now versus a redesign later.
+
+---
+
+## Summary judgement
+
+The concept is strong, unusually well-critiqued by its own documents, and
+correctly identifies its own hardest problem. It is also roughly 3,000 lines of
+theory ahead of its evidence. The first workplan's job is to close that gap with
+the thinnest possible slice capable of falsifying the thesis — not to build the
+architecture the documents describe.