Agent Compliance Conformance

Decide whether a compliance-ladder design and its adapter fixtures actually prove what they claim, or just perform compliance theater.

Use This For

• Freezing a compliance ladder (C0-C6) or transcript-fidelity ladder (T0-T5) before any surface ships a numeric badge.
• Auditing whether doc, schema, UI, and probe surfaces genuinely agree on every level's id, order, name, and required predicates.
• Designing or reviewing an adapter conformance probe suite across Codex, Claude Code, Cloudflare, Ollama/LM Studio, and custom stdio/HTTP agents.
• Deciding whether a forged-capability, MCP-bypass, disabled-hook, forged-heartbeat, or observed-to-controlled attack is actually caught, not just documented as a risk.
• Investigating why a level advanced when nothing daemon-witnessed backs the claim.

Do Not Use This For

• Adversarial review of a cryptographic protocol or whitepaper's soundness (redteam-review).
• Writing or verifying TLA+/formal invariants for a daemon monitor process (runtime-verification-for-agents).
• Agent identity, successor/predecessor linkage, or reputation decay across restarts (agent-identity-continuity-reputation).

Decision Model

flowchart TD
  A[Freeze one canonical ladder: id, order, name, requiredPredicates] --> B[Collect every surface: doc, schema, ui, probe]
  B --> C{Every surface identical to canonical?}
  C -->|No| D[ladder-name-order-drift: fix root cause, re-audit]
  C -->|Yes| E[Collect adapter fixtures: Codex, Claude, Cloudflare, Ollama, custom]
  E --> F{All 5 negative probes present per adapter?}
  F -->|No| G[missing-negative-probe: wire the fixture]
  F -->|Yes| H{Every fired probe downgraded honestly?}
  H -->|No| I[no-downgrade-on-forgery: fix the daemon check]
  H -->|Yes| J{Every non-base level backed by >=1 witnessed adapter?}
  J -->|No| K[level-advances-on-self-report: add a fixture before granting it]
  J -->|Yes| L[pass: true — safe to freeze and ship]

1. Freeze one canonical ladder per axis. Compliance (C0-C6) and transcript fidelity (T0-T5) are separate axes — see references/compliance-and-fidelity-ladders.md. A level needs an id, an order, a display name, and a requiredPredicates array of structured predicate strings, never prose.
2. Enumerate every surface that declares the ladder. Doc, schema, UI, and probe form each need their own entry; a ladder with zero entries for one of the four is an incomplete freeze, not yet a drift bug.
3. Diff every surface against the canonical ladder. Same id must mean the same order, the same name, and the same predicate set everywhere — the binder's own docs disagree on C3's name today, which is exactly the bug this step exists to catch.
4. Enumerate the five required negative probes per adapter fixture, per references/negative-probe-catalog.md: forged-level, direct-mcp-bypass, disabled-hook-after-launch, forged-heartbeat, observed-to-controlled.
5. Verify each probe is present — an actual, daemon-exercised fixture, not a stubbed or planned one — and, if fired, that it downgraded the adapter's effective level. An absent downgraded flag is never assumed true.
6. Verify every non-base level has a witness. A level with order > 0 and zero adapters backed by a present, correctly-downgrading probe is reachable by self-report alone.
7. Fail closed. Pass only when there are zero critical findings and the score clears the bar — never treat an empty findings array from incomplete auditing as the same thing as a clean one from thorough auditing.

Output Contract

A frozen, ship-safe ladder design carries:

• ladders: canonical id/order/name/requiredPredicates for every level on every axis in scope.
• surfaces: a doc, schema, ui, and probe declaration per ladder, each identical to canonical.
• adapters: one fixture per backend, each with all five negative probes present and downgraded.
• Zero critical findings and score >= 75 from the audit.

Use scripts/conformance_audit.mjs to audit a conformance-spec JSON payload and return { pass, score, findings, recommendations }.

Anti-Patterns

Ladder Drift Across Surfaces

Novice: Ship a compliance badge because "the compliance plan doc says C3 is Suggestible" without checking that the UI component, the JSON schema, and the probe implementation agree — they don't, and now three surfaces silently mean three different things by the same number. Expert: Treat the ladder as frozen only once doc, schema, UI, and probe all declare the exact same id, order, name, and requiredPredicates for every level — diff them structurally, don't eyeball them. Detection: conformance_audit.mjs fires ladder-name-order-drift (critical) when any surface's level disagrees with or omits a canonical level, and incomplete-surface-coverage (medium) when a ladder is missing a doc, schema, ui, or probe declaration entirely.

Self-Report Without a Falsifiable Probe

Novice: Let an adapter claim C5 because the body's own status report says so, with no fixture that ever tried to forge or disprove that claim. Expert: Treat a level as earned only when a real, daemon-exercised negative-probe fixture exists for it — a documented risk with no wired fixture is a checkbox, not evidence. Detection: conformance_audit.mjs fires missing-negative-probe (critical) when a required probe kind is absent or not present for an adapter, and level-advances-on-self-report (critical) when a non-base level has zero adapters backed by any witnessed, correctly-downgrading probe.

Forgery That Slips Through

Novice: Build the direct-mcp-bypass or observed-to-controlled attack fixture, run it, watch it succeed, and ship anyway because "at least we tested it." Expert: A probe that fires and isn't caught is worse than no probe at all — it proves the exact bypass works. Fix the daemon-side check before the level can be granted, and never assume an untested downgraded outcome is safe. Detection: conformance_audit.mjs fires no-downgrade-on-forgery (critical) when a present: true probe has downgraded false or absent — fail-closed, not fail-open.

References

File	Load When
references/compliance-and-fidelity-ladders.md	Need the canonical C0-C6 / T0-T5 level definitions, or the exact source of the C3 naming contradiction.
references/negative-probe-catalog.md	Need the five required probe kinds, or the exact meaning of present vs downgraded.
examples/expected-output.md	Need to see a drifted, self-attesting ladder audited, then the same design frozen and passing.
templates/output-template.md	Need a reusable ladder-freeze decision template to fill in.
schemas/conformance-spec.schema.json	Need to validate a conformance-spec JSON payload's structure before auditing it.
scripts/conformance_audit.mjs	Need deterministic scoring of a ladder design's readiness to freeze.
agents/openai.yaml	Need a subagent descriptor for delegated conformance auditing.

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Skill Bundle Index

Every file in this skill, and when to open it. Auto-generated; run scripts/index_references.py --fix.

root

• CHANGELOG.md — Agent Compliance Conformance — Changelog — - Initial skill creation - Compliance ladder (C0-C6) and transcript-fidelity ladder (T0-T5) freeze process defined - Deterministic `conforma
• README.md — Agent Compliance Conformance — Audit a compliance-ladder design (C0-C6) and transcript-fidelity ladder (T0-T5), plus their adapter conformance fixtures, for cross-surface

agents/

• agents/openai.yaml — openai (data/schema)

examples/

• examples/expected-output.md — Example Output: Agent Compliance Conformance — Scenario: a team ships a compliance-ladder design where the doc surface renamed C3 from "Suggestible" to "Controllable," the schema su
• examples/sample-input.json — sample input (data/schema)
• examples/weak-input.json — weak input (data/schema)

references/

• references/compliance-and-fidelity-ladders.md — Compliance Ladder And Transcript Fidelity Ladder — Use this when you need the canonical level definitions to compare a doc, schema, UI, or probe surface against, or when you need to know whic
• references/negative-probe-catalog.md — Negative Probe Catalog — Use this when you need to know which hostile fixtures a compliance-conformance suite must run against every adapter, or need the exact meani

schemas/

• schemas/conformance-spec.schema.json — conformance spec.schema (data/schema)

scripts/

• scripts/conformance_audit.mjs

templates/

• templates/output-template.md — Compliance Ladder Freeze Decision — Fill in every section before letting any C-badge or T-fidelity label ship.

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