ADR-0003: Executable-Spec Artifact Durability

• Status: Accepted, scope reduced by the Cathedral Cut (2026-07-14)
• Author: AgentOps maintainers

Context

Acceptance examples are useful only when their content survives the run that created them. Repository authors may keep published examples under spec/scenarios/ and private evaluation inputs under an ignored local path. AgentOps no longer creates, promotes, schedules, or closes either kind.

Decision

• Published scenario artifacts live under spec/scenarios/ and may be linked from an operator-authored GOALS.md directive.
• Private holdout scenarios may live under .agents/holdout/ and remain local.
• Read-only goal inspection resolves a published scenario before a local holdout with the same ID.
• ao goals scenarios lists or lints existing links. It does not create, promote, mutate, schedule, or deliver them.
• Schemas and test fixtures remain tracked repository inputs.

The former domain-slice manifest and phased-RPI machinery are retired. Plan's write_scope and acceptance scenarios are the per-invocation boundary.

Consequences

Repository authors control their specification format and Git policy. AgentOps can inspect durable acceptance links without becoming their authoring, scheduling, or delivery system.

References

• schemas/scenario.v1.schema.json
• spec/scenarios/
• docs/architecture/operating-loop.md