The briefs on this site were produced under the assessment protocol in RULEBOOK.md. What follows is that document's own wording, condensed. The full protocol — including the QA checklist every packet had to clear — ships with the site.
Section map. This page publishes four Rulebook sections: §0 item 3 only (quoted under Evidence tiers below), §1 (the tier table), §4.3 (claim-inventory statuses, on the conveyor), §4.9 (ring assignment rules, including the close). Everything else in the protocol (§2 source hierarchy, §3 pinning and cutoff, the rest of the §4 packet template, §5 deepening questions, §6 cross-cutting lenses, §7 language rules, §8 QA checklist) lives only in RULEBOOK.md, which ships with the site.
NODUS is the program's verdict system: each packet assigns one of four rings, naming what the evidence supports doing with the repo. Justified in one line per criterion (technology readiness, strategic relevance, impact potential, implementation feasibility, time to mainstream, collaboration potential). Ring assignment rules, Rulebook §4.9:
Requires independent validation plus governance. No repo in the suite holds it: 0 of 44 are independently validated (synthesis/00-overview.md).
Requires a release artifact plus a bounded, real workload fit. The packets place 3 repos here: asupersync, franken_agent_detection, franken_ocr. "Pilot" names the fit; it is not a recommendation to ship.
The default for substantive-but-unproven. Most of the suite lives here.
Websites, retired artifacts, and plan-stage work. The four website repos, the two beads dashboards, and franken_nlp (plan-stage).
Rulebook §4.9, last line: "When in doubt, ring down, not up."
Each packet scores technology readiness on the 1–9 scale and justifies the score in one line. Observed across the suite: TRL 2–3 up to 9 (the 9 is one packet's own rating of a deployed website artifact, not a suite-wide norm). TRL measures readiness, not quality.
Rulebook §0: "Every substantive claim carries an evidence tier and a confidence grade. A claim without both is a draft note, not a finding." Confidence grades: High (multiple converging sources or direct inspection), Medium (single solid source, plausible), Low (thin evidence, extrapolation).
The animation walks eight enforcement points. The kit's checklist (starter-kit/CHECKLIST.md) has 28 items. Six more that matter, in the checklist's own terms:
A second agent (fresh eyes, different model, or adversarial duel) reviews the packet and records what changed. The machine verifies the attestation exists; it can never verify the review's quality. READY is not the same as reviewed.
The 12 forbidden reward-hacking patterns are named verbatim in the project's agent instructions: gate self-weakening, proof-class inflation, golden regeneration reflex, commit-stream pumping, tautological tests, easy-lever cherry-picking, close-pump abuse, scope-splitting, spec-editing as progress, conformance metastasis, dependency smuggling, bench-path hardcoding — under three load-bearing rules: never weaken a gate to land a change; no self-grading without independent verification; demotions are always allowed. Verified by review.
The beads graph is the plan of record; documents explain why, beads say what is being done and whether it closed. .beads/issues.jsonl is non-empty and current; no parallel prose tracker exists.
A bead closes only with a close_reason citing the evidence (commit, receipt, ledger row); prose assertions never close beads. Verified by review of closed beads.
Any waiver of a release-blocking gate states rationale, owner, expiry, and compensating controls; waivers bypassing a release-blocking gate force NO_GO unless all four are recorded and signed off. No waiver outlives its expiry.
Every work session ends with the landing ritual: file beads for remaining work, run the quality gates, update bead states, sync the tracker, hand off context.
The CI backstop in the diagram is the starter kit's workflow, shipped as templates/kit-gates.yml (installed by init.sh as .github/workflows/kit-gates.yml). Its job is to re-run the gates where git's --no-verify can't reach. None of the 44 assessed repos runs it.
What the 44 packets found about the repos' own CI (synthesis/00-overview.md. These are assessment findings, not this machine's output): public CI green at the pin, 2 of 44 (frankenscipy, franken_threed) · red at the pin, 11 · CI exists but no pin verdict, 6 · no test CI / deploy-only, 10 · CI disabled or deleted, 8 · private-only and unobservable, 7. The 42-of-44 figure measures whether public CI was green at the assessed commit. It measures CI, not claim demotions. Disclosure: frankenjax is filed C4 in the overview matrix; this site reclassifies it C6 per the legend's RCH criterion (packet: all green claims execute on the maintainer's private RCH fleet, attested only by checked-in JSON).
Every public claim gets a row in templates/claims.tsv before the README gets a sentence. It carries a status and a proof slot. A claim registered after the fact is a rationalization, not a claim. (The suite's best coverage audits found registries capture only 2.0% and 6.8% of claims in the wild, checklist item B12. The registry is the floor, not the ceiling.)
scripts/check-readiness.sh machine-checks the plan once at the phase gate: 12 sections, and a missing one means NOT READY. It checks structure, not truth. Independent review (A13) is the semantic backstop.
The pre-commit hook runs the claim check on every commit, and first fails a deliberately overclaimed canary to prove it still has teeth. A gate that can't fail is decoration. (git's --no-verify bypasses the hook silently; the CI backstop is the answer to that.)
Claim discipline: every enforced README claim must resolve to a real proof artifact, cross-checked by scripts/check-claim-discipline.sh. A public README with zero enforced claims fails the check. README drift is a governance failure, not documentation debt.
templates/kit-gates.yml re-runs every gate where --no-verify can't reach. This is the kit's workflow, installed by init.sh. The 44 repos' own CI results are assessed separately (see the panel above).
Independent review (A13) is the semantic backstop. The demotion rules (D1–D7) are written down in advance (A6) as templates/demotion-rules.md and executed on schedule by review (B8): expired manual proofs demote, open P0s block release claims, retired ids are tombstoned. Gate changes need two-direction evidence (B7). All procedural: nothing here is automatic.
Promotion needs a gate; demotion needs counter-evidence. The starter rules live in templates/demotion-rules.md. In this reenactment the counter-evidence is the assessment packet's own recorded verdict, quoted in the claims panel, cited by file and line.
The project's memory of what didn't work: hypothesis, verdict, retry predicate, lesson (row schema: templates/negative-evidence-entry.md). The pre-commit hook lints every staged row and rejects weasel retry predicates ("later", "TBD", "n/a"). Every reject needs a retry predicate. Never "later".
Every token carries one of these claims, quoted word-for-word from the claim inventory (Rulebook §4.3) of its assessment packet. Each entry names the packet file and line, the packet's recorded status, and — for demoted claims — the packet's own counter-evidence. The twelve claim strings are verbatim from their packets. The counter-evidence blocks are each packet's own recorded verdict, lightly normalized for display (stripped Markdown, quote-style changes, truncation of trailing detail) — the quoted wording is the packet's wording, and one block adds a one-sentence plain-language gloss outside the quotation marks.