Development record

alice-reads-one-page-and-knows-exactly-where-abcd-stands-in

specclosedspc-15

Summary

spc-15 delivers itd-100: a public terminology crosswalk at docs/reference/terminology.md mapping established agentic-AI terms to abcd's position on each. Every row carries the term, a one-line established definition with a footnote citation to a primary source, and abcd's position as exactly one of USES (native vocabulary — the row names the verb or principle), ADAPTS (different name, sharper meaning — the row says why), REJECTS (with the recorded reason), or WATCHING (with the record id being watched). Every abcd claim is grounded in the committed record; every established definition is grounded in a fetch-verified primary source.

The term inventory and all positions were settled at the 2026-07-26 maintainer grill (dcn-2607260000000001); the sweep evidence came from a six-cluster primary-source research pass (protocols, core loop, context, safety, governance, operations) plus a full record-mapping pass, all URLs fetch-verified 2026-07-26 and the two bot-blocked OpenAI posts human-verified 2026-07-27.

Scope

The page: docs/reference/terminology.md — Diátaxis reference type, 26 rows (8 USES / 10 ADAPTS / 7 WATCHING / 1 REJECTS), alphabetical order with a thematic mini-index (six clusters) at the top.
A row in docs/reference/README.md naming the page.
A CHANGELOG entry (user-facing addition).
Four ledger captures for the WATCHING follow-ups the grill confirmed: SKILL.md-compatibility watch, AAIF/AGENTS.md stewardship citation watch, tamper-evident receipts, and payments-protocols-no-recorded-position (the STOP-condition outcome — the record is silent on payments, so no REJECTS was invented).
An ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS entry for the practitioner post that seeded the crosswalk idea (inspiration credit only; the post is not a source and no citation on the page rests on it).

Out of scope:

A structural docs-lint rule ("every table row carries at least one footnote") — assessed at implement time; deferred unless it slots into an existing rule shape without a bespoke engine. If deferred, that is recorded, not silent.
Resolving iss-40 (glossary unification). The page is designed to be neutral to that outcome (see Design decisions).
An MCP server, any protocol adoption, or any change to abcd behaviour — this is a documentation artefact.

Design decisions (resolved in the 2026-07-26 maintainer grill)

Mapping, not a registry. The crosswalk holds no canonical definitions of native terms — external term, cited external definition, position, and an inline gloss of the native concept only. Canonical native definitions stay in the record's glossary (single-home direction under iss-40); cross-references are restricted to docs/** because .abcd/development/ is excluded from the release artefact. Record ids (itd-N / iss-N / adr-N) appear as text, never as links.
Citations are footnotes; vendor names live only there. Bare markers in the table; full citation with DOI/URL in the footnote. Host and vendor names are confined to citation footnote lines, each carrying the sanctioned  per-line escape — verified compatible with the harness/* banned-token family, whose matching and allow-escape are both line-scoped (checkBannedTokens, internal/core/lint/lint.go).
Admission rule for terms: a primary anchor only — an official specification, a standards body, a peer-reviewed paper with DOI, or multi-vendor primary engineering documentation (vendor engineering posts admissible only where they are the origin of the term). No single-author coinages, no aggregators. Consequences the grill blessed: "agentic workflow", "Policy Layer", "Agentic Pipeline", ANP, AGNTCY, and Mastercard's Verifiable Intent get no rows; x402 and the OpenAI/Stripe Agentic Commerce Protocol fold into the AP2 footnote (noting the "ACP" abbreviation collision with IBM's retired Agent Communication Protocol, merged into A2A in 2025); the policy-engine anchor (NIST SP 800-207) folds into the policy-as-code row.
Positions never outrun the record. A2A and AP2 are WATCHING, not REJECTS — itd-33 is a draft and the payments silence is a capture, because a REJECTS row requires a recorded reason and inventing one is the named failure mode. Honesty notes ship in-row where the record demands them (prompt-injection canaries: the lint code is reserved and execution is a design target, neither shipped; MCP: adapter shape recorded, no MCP server ships today).
British English prose; US English stays code-side. The persona and quote conventions of the intent corpus do not apply to the reference page (no personas on the page).

Approach

Single hand-authored Markdown page. The mini-index groups the 26 alphabetical rows into the six research clusters; each index entry is a same-page anchor. Footnotes use standard Markdown footnote syntax and sit at the end of the page. The page must pass abcd docs (docs-currency lint) with zero blockers: no change-narration tokens, all relative links resolving, vendor tokens only on allow-escaped footnote lines.

Delivery lands as small atomic commits on docs/itd-100-terminology-crosswalk: record promotion (this spec + itd-100 to planned/), the page + README row + CHANGELOG + ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS, and the ledger captures — reviewed per the run contract (ruthless review + docs-currency review), PR opened and left for the maintainer; never merged by the agent.

Acceptance-criteria satisfaction

AC1 (row shape) — the table's columns are term / established meaning (footnoted) / position, position vocabulary fixed to the four labels; review checks every row.
AC2 (primary sources) — the footnote corpus is exactly the fetch-verified sweep output recorded in the grill package; no aggregator URLs.
AC3 (record-grounded positions) — each position cites its record artefact by id or path gloss; WATCHING rows name an open record id (itd-16, itd-29, itd-33, iss-62, plus the captures minted in this delivery, iss-138–iss-141).
AC4 (lint-clean) — abcd docs runs clean on the branch; vendor names appear only on footnote lines carrying the allow escape.
AC5 (docs/-only cross-references)** — the page links only within docs/**; native terms are glossed inline, never deep-linked into the development record.

Frontmatter

id	spc-15
type	spec
lifecycle	closed

.abcd/development/specs/closed/spc-15-alice-reads-one-page-and-knows-exactly.md
open on GitHub ↗ · commit history ↗

References1

itd-100Alice Reads One Page and Knows Exactly Where abcd Stands in the Agentic-AI Landscapeimplements

mentions12

dcn-26072600000000012026-07-26 — itd-100 grill settled: crosswalk is a mapping not a registry (no canonical native definitions; gloss-only rows, docs/** links only, pending iss-40); alphabetical + thematic mini-index; footnote citations with per-line docs-lint allow for vendor names; British English. Positions: A2A and AP2/payments both WATCHING (AP2 via new capture — record silent, REJECTS never invented; x402 + OpenAI/Stripe ACP folded into the AP2 footnote); policy engine folded into policy-as-code row; agent skills is the sole REJECTS (brief 08-skills commands-only rule). Rejected-term admissions blessed (agentic workflow, ANP, AGNTCY, Verifiable Intent, harness engineering, ISO 22989-as-HITL-anchor). LinkedIn anecdote omitted from itd-100. Two OpenAI harness URLs await maintainer read before ship.
dcn-26072700000000022026-07-27 — DEFERRED the row-has-footnote structural docs-lint rule (spc-15 out-of-scope): no existing rule shape covers table-row-to-footnote structure, so it would need a bespoke check; the grill left it optional and the citation-gate intent (itd-101) is now its natural home — implement it there or not at all. Recorded per spc-15's deferral-is-recorded clause; surfaced by the itd-100 fidelity audit's gap check.
iss-40one canonical glossary: 02-constraints/04-naming.md maintains a term registry that competes with the brief glossary/ directory; glossary/ is itself stale (contexts and terms missing from its own index, a validation command that does not exist) and is invisible to the brief — neither README.md nor 00-meta.md mention it. Detector: a single-registry rule enforced by a glossary lint — one canonical home, terms in the record resolve to it, the index derived rather than hand-kept, and a banlist entry for the retired registry location once merged. Acceptance corpus: the competing registry, the missing index entries, and the phantom validation command.
iss-62abcd-managed repos must guarantee the user's chosen git identity (name + email) is honoured on every commit. ahoy doctor should detect when the effective git author/committer identity diverges from the user's GitHub identity — a stray repo-local user.name/user.email override (e.g. a sandbox 'Test User <test@example.com>' shadowing the global identity), or committer != author — and, rather than silently setting it, PROPOSE a default (the global git identity, or the gh-authenticated account) and ASK the user to confirm before writing repo-local config. Motivation: a repo-local 'Test User <test@example.com>' override silently authored/committed 54 commits (pushed to origin) before detection this run, forcing a history rewrite + force-push to correct. A managed-repo identity gate at ahoy/doctor time catches it before the first commit.
iss-138payments protocols have no recorded position: the itd-100 terminology crosswalk found the record silent on agent-led payments (AP2 at the FIDO Alliance, x402, the two-vendor Agentic Commerce Protocol). The crosswalk row is WATCHING because a REJECTS needs a recorded reason; this capture is where that reason gets decided — likely out-of-scope-by-design for a development-configuration tool, but that is a maintainer call, not an inference. Detector: the crosswalk row cites this id; resolving it means recording the position and updating the row.
iss-141tamper-evident receipts: receipts and review directories are hash-anchored and manifests are verified, but nothing is cryptographically signed and there is no append-only chain over the receipt history — integrity evidence, not proof against a capable insider. itd-16 (hash-chain/Merkle audit umbrella, draft) is the design home; this capture tracks the narrower question of whether the existing receipt flow should become tamper-evident (RFC 9162-style verifiable log or signing) independent of the full audit umbrella. The itd-100 crosswalk's tamper-evidence row cites this id.
itd-16`/abcd:audit` Is the Umbrella; Conversation/Edit Chain Is Its Default Application
itd-29Domain Experts Run A Spec Autonomously And Recover From Anything Without Touching Git
itd-33Multiple Agents Coordinate On Intent And Spec Work Without Duplicating Effort Or Producing Competing Artefacts
itd-59Every Autonomous Run Pass Leaves the Same Durable, Queryable Transcript an Interactive Session Does
itd-101**Every citation abcd publishes is provably alive and honestly labelled — and the gate that enforces it never flakes.** A cited reference page is only as trustworthy as its links, and links rot silently: pages retitle, URLs redirect, whole platforms announce their own shutdown. abcd splits citation validation across a deterministic gate and an explicit refresh. An offline lint family checks structure and source policy on every commit — footnote markers and definitions in bijection, URLs and DOIs well-formed, aggregator domains refused — with zero network in the gate. `abcd docs cite refresh` does the live fetching on demand and writes a committed baseline: per URL, the final resolved address, when it was last checked, and whether verification was automatic or manual — never how. Sources that block automated fetchers join a manual queue the maintainer clears link by link: printed as a checklist first, later as a generated, disposable checklist page that hands back a receipt file the verb ingests. The lint then enforces the baseline offline — no broken entries, no stale entries, no cited URL without a receipt, no citation whose recorded final address has drifted. The engine is native and dependency-free first; a specialist link checker can slot in later behind the same seam. "My release gate stays deterministic and my citations stay alive," said Kira, an open-source maintainer. "When a source needs human eyes, abcd hands me the exact list to click through and records that I did — not how I did it."
spc-17every-citation-abcd-publishes-is-provably-alive-and-honestly