AI Engineering Research

An open index of evidence, theory, and practice

research-document

AI Engineering Handoff

Research Area
General Research
Status
draft
Version
0.1
Priority
medium
Updated
2026-07-22
Source
HANDOFF.md

AI Engineering Handoff

Objective

Continue evidence-traceable evaluation of long-horizon repository agents while preserving the repository's pre-ROS history and compatibility boundaries.

Current state

  • Root CURRENT-STATE.md is authoritative; context/CURRENT-STATE.md is a derived ROS entry point.
  • Evaluation Cycles 001–003 and the repository-wide non-human comparative review are complete. No agent capability trial or independent replication is claimed.
  • The 20 commits before ROS installation are reconstructed as eight explicitly historical records in .ros/history/historical-work.jsonl.
  • Historical records never enter the live .ros/events/events.jsonl stream and cannot authorize transitions.
  • The state-constrained research corpus is publishable as Markdown.
  • Eleven proposed research missions in missions/backlog/ now represent the deduplicated RFR-001–RFR-010 and NX-005 research TODO set.

Historical migration completed

  • Human index: docs/repository/ros-migration/HISTORICAL-WORK-INDEX.md
  • Policy decision: research/decisions/DF-ROS-HISTORY-2026-0001--historical-attribution-policy.md
  • Schema: schemas/historical-work.schema.json
  • Validation implementation and tests: tools/ros_cli.mjs, tools/test_ros_history.mjs

The backfill is reconstructed from Git and repository documents. It does not claim that historical work originally followed ROS. Original external work-item IDs, approvals, and tests remain unknown when no repository evidence exists.

Validation

Run:

npm test
npm run research:validate
./ros registry check
./ros validate
./ros status

Unresolved questions and risks

  1. Independent reviewers have not yet validated ET-004-P01 or ET-014-P01.
  2. Frozen graders have not been challenged with independently authored unseen outcomes.
  3. No successful GitHub Pages deployment receipt is recorded.
  4. The historical state-constrained corpus lacks a single execution journal covering authorship and evidence collection across all 12 missions.
  5. Metadata coverage remains diagnostic and incomplete outside strict ROS artifact directories.

Next action

Start with prompts/Non-Human-Experimental-Research-Next-Mission.md: obtain independent pilot reviews and challenge frozen graders with unseen outcomes before running any contained exploratory capability baseline.