Registry Baseline Grill Status

Scope and authority

Replace the manifest-driven hi scaffold, hi update, and hi check flow with a registry-based Baseline: registry publication, a hi installer, Project settings plus an installed record, a three-way Drift check, Harness adapters for subagents, and the fix for issue #232 in the same release.

Inputs:

• Decision log: Q1 to Q13 accepted during the brainstorm on 2026-09-27; later ids from grill rounds.
• Architecture research (issue history, state consumers, shadcn semantics, harness inventory).
• Target system brainstorm (ten flow failure lenses, candidates K1 to K15).
• Existing glossaries stay applicable where not superseded: manifest-driven update, managed lint, commit gate.

Out of scope: implementation order, task breakdown, backlog projection, hi report, and the backoffice.

Current Round

• Round: R2 closed; frontier empty; grill closed on 2026-09-27
• Current frontier: empty
• Shared-understanding confirmation: confirmed (user: "agree with this", then invoked create-architecture)
• Branch completion: 100% for every active branch. This is requirements closure, not implementation progress.
• Glossary promoted to Registry Baseline Glossary.
• R2 closed on 2026-09-27: Q33 and Q35 as recommended; Q34 reversed (the Baseline skill wins, the Project Skill is renamed [DEPRECATED] <name> and reported).
• Domain-modeling consistency pass: complete against the glossary below; the Project Skill axiom was amended for Q34.
• R1 closed on 2026-09-27: all recommendations accepted except Q19 (no credentials; registry stays public, supersedes Q11), Q27 (report failed symlinks, no copy fallback), Q30 (no hi add), Q31 (pre-existing skills are moved into .agents/skills as Project Skills instead of archived).

Branch Dashboard

Technical Grounding

Parked Branches

• Selectable harness set per repository (Q29). Resume trigger: a repository that must exclude one harness.
• Single Registry Item selection outside Packs (Q35). Resume trigger: a real request for one skill that no Pack contains.
• Concurrent hi update runs in one worktree: not observed in the issue history; non-material.

Glossary

Working persistence for domain-modeling during this grill. Terms from existing glossaries are kept unless listed under retired.

Terms

• Registry: The published, versioned set of Registry Items that is the only Baseline distributor and the source for drift management. Avoid: baseline artifact, release asset, control plane
• Registry Item: One named, typed bundle of files and metadata in the Registry, in the shadcn registry-item format. Avoid: component, asset (when meaning a whole item)
• Baseline: One immutable Registry version. Avoid: stable channel, bundled channel
• Installed Record: The installer-written file that records the installed Baseline version, the Recorded Shape, and the item-to-path map. Avoid: manifest, receipt, lockfile
• Recorded Shape: The repository shape captured at install time: workspace paths, Pack ids, detected technologies. Avoid: context plan, detection result
• Copied Artifact: A Managed Artifact written verbatim from a Registry Item. Avoid: tier 1, static file
• Built Artifact: A Managed Artifact rendered from a Registry Item template, Project settings, and the Recorded Shape. Avoid: tier 2, generated file
• Authored Artifact: A repository-owned file that the installer writes once when absent and never compares afterwards. Avoid: tier 3, scaffold-once file
• Harness Adapter: Installer code that wraps one built subagent body in one harness's envelope. Kept from the CLI context architecture glossary.
• Drift Check: The three-way comparison of local bytes, the installed Baseline, and the latest Baseline. Kept from the CLI update enforcement glossary with the new meaning. Classes: update-available, local-edit, conflict, shape-drift, missing, stale, link-failed.
• Project Skill: A skill under .agents/skills/<id> that no Registry Item provides; it is an Authored Artifact. Avoid: pre-existing skill, local skill, replaced skill

Relationships

• A Registry contains one or more Baselines; a Baseline contains one or more Registry Items.
• A Pack selects one or more Registry Items through registry dependencies.
• The Installed Record references exactly one Baseline.
• Every Managed Artifact is exactly one of Copied Artifact, Built Artifact, or Authored Artifact.

Axioms

• No content hash of a Managed Artifact is stored in the repository.
• Each local state file has exactly one writer.
• A Baseline is immutable; a correction is a new Baseline.
• The Registry is the only Baseline source; there is no bundled fallback.
• The Registry is public; the installer sends no credential.
• The installer never removes, compares, or overwrites a Project Skill. On an id collision with a Registry Item, the Baseline skill wins and the Project Skill is renamed [DEPRECATED] <name> and reported.
• A Pack is the only selection unit; detection proposes, it never selects.
• Single Registry Item selection outside Packs is parked.

Retired (accepted in Q32)

• Scaffold Manifest, Validation Candidate, Prepared Installation, Validation Result, Cache Entry, Context Plan (as a persisted file).

Flagged Ambiguities

• "Login" was used by the user for the current Baseline access control. Code shows no CLI login; the API holds a server-side GitHub token. Resolution: Q19, no credential mechanism; the registry is public.
• "Baseline" meant a tarball plus control-plane metadata; it now means one Registry version.
• "Drift" meant a recorded hash mismatch; it now means one of the Drift Check classes.