ECC/docs/ROADMAP.md

ECC Roadmap

Status: maintainer planning draft, updated 2026-09-09 against the integrated source candidate based on release 2.2.1. Source inclusion is not a release or live verification claim. Dates are targets, not commitments; bracketed numbers remain planning choices.

The two older planning docs stay as evidence and history: docs/ECC-2.0-GA-ROADMAP.md (2.0 milestones and control-plane deltas) and docs/ECC-PRO-SECURITY-ROADMAP.md (AgentShield and Pro conversion). This file is the short, current view.

Vision

ECC is the operating layer between a developer and whatever coding agent they run. Shared skills, rules, and agent guidance provide portable core workflows across Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Cursor, Gemini, and other harnesses. Hooks, installation paths, and feature coverage vary by host; consult the support status matrix for current limits. The bar for everything that ships: simpler to read, faster to run, and traceable after the fact, for agents and humans alike.

Three things follow from that.

1. The repo is the product. Curated skills, hooks, and rules are the surface people install. Anything that is not installed, tested, or read by someone should not be in the tree.
2. Evidence over assertion. A harness change earns trust through a gate receipt, a capsule, and a reproducible verdict, not through a paragraph saying it works. The offline eval framework provides the recording and review primitives; isolated candidate execution remains future work.
3. Operator patterns travel. Approval loops, channel discipline, agreement generation, and e-sign placement were built for one desk. As generic skills they are useful to anyone running agents next to counterparties, customers, or money.

Where we are

• The 2.2.1 source baseline includes guided manifest-driven setup, install-state ownership, repair and uninstall. Its release workflow requires exact-head validation; this roadmap is not release-signature evidence.
• Catalog in this source snapshot: 68 agents, 289 skills, 94 legacy commands. The count is a liability as much as an asset. Overlapping and unreferenced skills exist.
• The README now has one primary install section, with per-harness details and release history linked to CHANGELOG.md. Further shortening is a target, not a completed claim.
• Eval source now includes capsule journals, replay matching and offline receipt inspection, plus a protocol example. Candidate execution and staged gate runs are disabled: no actual OS containment exists. Offline validation and a receipt signature do not establish safe execution or promotion authority.
• The README describes AgentShield scanning and the hosted ECC Pro surface. Further conversion and scan-history improvements below are proposals, not evidence of missing paid functionality or verified adoption.

Plan

Track A: condense

Cut what nobody reads or installs. Merge what overlaps. One README that reads top to bottom in one pass. Exit criteria: no zero-reference tracked doc outside docs/releases/, no deprecated skill still shipped by default, README under [1,200] lines with one install path per harness.

Track B: evidence

Implement and independently test an OS executor before enabling the gate: contain child processes, filesystem and network access, scrub inherited capabilities, enforce resource limits, and bind replay and result provenance. Keep execution disabled until those boundaries are proven. Then wire the harness-optimizer agent and /harness-audit to emit gate receipts. Add capsule recording to the hooks that already log session activity. Then the next two plan slices: offline retrospective grouping over capsules (no new rollouts) and forced-compaction tests that prove pinned constraints survive.

Track C: operator skills

The four desk-pattern skills are present in this candidate: operator approval loop, counterparty channel discipline, master agreement drafting with bounded schedule append, and e-sign field placement guidance. Validate each with its actual consumer and collect outside feedback before adding more. Written send and audience contracts do not claim transport enforcement; generated agreements remain drafts and DOCX conversion does not establish execution readiness.

Track D: distribution and revenue

Keep the release path boring: tag on main, CI green at the exact head, packed artifact tested on three platforms. Improve the AgentShield-to-Pro conversion path, evaluating hosted scan history and a PR-comment autofix loop against what the hosted product already supports. Details and scoring live in the security roadmap.

Next 90 days

Window: 2026-09-02 to 2026-12-01.

September

• Review and release the composed 2026-09-02 program: offline eval frameworks, desk-pattern skills, condensation and this roadmap. The source candidate incorporates them; merge and release remain separate maintainer decisions.
• README linear pass merged. Release notes move to CHANGELOG.md only.
• Delete list from the condensation survey executed, with catalog counts, manifests, and locale mirrors updated in the same PR.
• Decide the fate of continuous-learning v1 (deprecated since April): remove in [2.3.0] with a migration note, or keep as an archive outside the default install.

October

• harness-optimizer and /harness-audit produce gate receipts. A skill, hook, or agent change in this repo can cite a receipt in its PR.
• Capsule recording behind an opt-in hook flag, journaling tool calls and session boundaries with the default-deny payload allowlist.
• First taskset beyond the example: [20 to 60] tasks over one real skill family, with a held-out split and a reward-hack fixture.
• Skill catalog review: every skill has a test, a command, an agent, or a README mention, or it is marked for removal in [2.4.0].

November

• 2.3.0: condensation, eval frameworks, and operator skills in one release with the packed-artifact gate.
• Retrospective grouping over recorded capsules for one task family, report only, no promotion.
• Forced-compaction invariance test in CI for the pinned-state pattern.
• AgentShield Pro conversion CTA and hosted scan history behind a flag.

Decision points

• 2026-09-30: is the README under the line target with no test regressions? If not, cut scope on Track A rather than slipping the release.
• 2026-10-31: does a real taskset produce a stable verdict across three runs? If variance is high, hold Track B at receipts and do not start retrospective grouping.
• 2026-11-30: did any outside user adopt a desk-pattern skill? If none, stop adding operator skills and fold the four into a single guide.

Not on this roadmap

• Online reinforcement learning or weight updates from capsule data.
• Production transparency-log witnessing, GPU attestation, or key management inside the ECC package.
• Automatic merge or release driven by a gate verdict. The gate stops changes. A person promotes them.
• Any desk, payment, provider, or counterparty integration. Those belong to the systems that own them, not to a portable plugin.

How to edit this file

Change the bracketed numbers first. Move items between months freely. When a line ships, delete it here and record it in CHANGELOG.md. Keep the file under [200] lines.