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Status: Draft 1.0 — Forward-looking specification and gap analysis.
This document is not a reverse-engineering report and is not a claim that the reference implementation already satisfies every requirement. It defines the target architecture for a production-grade, provider-neutral Semantic Execution System (SES), identifies the capabilities that remain to be specified or developed, and gives concrete acceptance criteria for future implementations.
The reference implementation may be used as an informative experiment, but the standard is the authority. Where the implementation and this specification differ, the implementation is considered incomplete until it is brought into conformance or the standard is deliberately amended.
Normative terms MUST, MUST NOT, REQUIRED, SHALL, SHALL NOT, SHOULD, SHOULD NOT, RECOMMENDED, and MAY have their usual standards meaning.
This document replaces “the current test tree proves the standard” with a forward-looking gap discipline. Existing implementation evidence is informative only.
Must be complete before broad adoption:
No feature should be marked “done” because the happy path works. It is done only when semantics, security, failure behavior, compatibility, and independent tests are specified.
The repository SHOULD maintain a machine-readable gap file with every requirement and status. This document is the human-readable interpretation of that matrix.
The machine-readable gap registry is conformance/known-gaps.json. It tracks the SES-019 roadmap backlog (SES-RM-01 … SES-RM-33) and the documentation/registry audit findings below, each with an explicit status.
A repository audit found the following gaps in the standard’s own supporting infrastructure. These are tracked as SES-GAP-* and SES-PUB-* entries in conformance/known-gaps.json.
| ID | Finding | Status |
|---|---|---|
| SES-GAP-01 | conformance/requirements.json had no root requirement for L0, L19–L26, or L101–L104 |
Proven (fixed) |
| SES-GAP-02 | SES-100 defines test requirement IDs only for L0–L16; scripts/verify-conformance.py only checks that range. L17–L26 have no defined conformance tests |
Proven (fixed — resolved together with SES-GAP-06’s renumbering; verify-conformance.py now checks L0–L26) |
| SES-GAP-03 | No machine-readable gap file existed despite §4 requiring one | Proven (fixed — see conformance/known-gaps.json) |
| SES-GAP-04 | The 34 SES-019 backlog items had no stable identifiers or status tracking | Proven (fixed — tracked as SES-RM-01…SES-RM-33) |
| SES-GAP-05 | SES-105 defines the portable vector format but no vector data files exist yet | Partial (fixed — 8 of 20 mandatory families now have a vector under conformance/vectors/; see that directory’s README.md for the remaining 12) |
| SES-GAP-06 | SES-100 §8’s L# section labels don’t follow the L#=SES-0## convention used elsewhere; from L6 onward every section actually tests SES-0(n+2), and SES-002 (Canonical Lifecycle) / SES-007 (Logical Traversal) have no correctly-labeled tests at all — leaving two critical root requirements (SES-LIFE-001, SES-TRV-001) effectively untested |
Proven (fixed — SES-100 §8 renumbered against conformance/requirements.json’s canonical layer list; L2 and L7 now have genuine test requirements) |
| SES-PUB-01 | The standard isn’t linked from mkdocs.yml nav, docs/, docs-site/, root README.md, or llms.txt |
Proven (fixed — see docs/STANDARDS.md, and the new “Standard” sections in README.md/llms.txt) |
| SES-PUB-02 | mkdocs.yml nav references three docs/*.md files that don’t exist (LAYER-SETUP.md, PRODUCT-IDENTITY.md, PROVIDER-INDEPENDENCE.md) |
Proven (fixed — and this finding undercounted the problem: a full pass found 7 broken nav targets, not 3; all 7 are now retargeted to real content or newly authored — see conformance/known-gaps.json for the corrected list) |
| SES-PUB-03 | Ten existing docs/*.md files are orphaned — not referenced in mkdocs.yml nav |
Proven (fixed — this finding was also stale: only 7 of the 10 listed files were actually orphaned at audit time. All 7 real orphans are now reachable from nav) |
| SES-PUB-04 | No CI workflow invokes verify-diagrams.py or verify-conformance.py |
Missing — deliberately deferred; both scripts still run manually only |
Remaining Missing items in this table are new backlog work and SHOULD be folded into the P0–P3 priorities in §2 during the next roadmap revision.
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