IDEA authority hardening — port missing PR #35 protections to current architecture

[eybersjp]

Legacy IDEA authority hardening supersession audit

PR #35 (fix/v0.9.1-field-hardening, head bbb55e9ceaa819620f0e6ea52848499b94ed69bb) is a stale pre-v0.10 branch. It must not be merged directly, but its authority hardening exposed protections that are only partially represented in v0.11.1.

Audit against current v0.11.1

Present in current architecture

• Persistent Product Owner decisions with fingerprints. runtime/orchestration/po-decisions.mjs persists decisions under .development-kit/decisions and validates content fingerprints.
• Persistent numbered decision menus and restart rehydration. decision-menu.mjs persists active-menu.json plus history.
• Fail-closed numeric menu resolution. No active menu, wrong stage, nonnumeric input, out-of-range input and already-resolved menus fail.
• Source-staleness guard for numbered decisions. resolveDecisionInput rejects a supplied current fingerprint that no longer matches the menu's sourceFingerprint.
• Exactly-one-question interaction rule exists as an agent rule. agents/product-discovery-agent.md explicitly requires one question per turn.

Partial / insufficient compared with PR #35

• Exactly-one-question rule is not runtime-enforced. Current enforcement is prompt/agent-level, whereas PR fix(reliability): v0.9.1 field hardening and IDEA authority persistence #35 implemented workflow state capable of enforcing interaction sequence deterministically.
• Provenance is not a strict requirement-candidate authority model. Current idea suggestions accept a generic provenance string; PR fix(reliability): v0.9.1 field hardening and IDEA authority persistence #35 used explicit USER_STATED / AI_PROPOSED / RESEARCH_DERIVED / ASSUMED classes and controlled transitions.
• Product Owner authority defaults need hardening review. Current helpers include convenience defaults such as decisionAuthority = 'Product Owner' / product-owner provenance. PR fix(reliability): v0.9.1 field hardening and IDEA authority persistence #35 deliberately removed implicit approving-authority defaults for authoritative transitions.
• Current numbered-menu fingerprint protects menu source staleness, not the full presented interaction. PR fix(reliability): v0.9.1 field hardening and IDEA authority persistence #35 bound consumption to an expectedInteractionFingerprint for the exact pending interaction.

Missing from current v0.11.1 runtime

• Persist-before-asking / rehydrate-before-proposing IDEA workflow state machine. The current runtime/orchestration tree has no idea-workflow.mjs.
• Requirement-candidate transition state machine. Current main has no idea-discovery.mjs equivalent implementing candidate confirmation/adoption/rejection/supersession transitions.
• Crash-safe discovery journal. Current main has no discovery-journal.json workflow implementation.
• Append-only interaction-consumption receipts / replay protection. Current main has no idea-consumptions.mjs equivalent.
• Interaction fingerprint mismatch error path equivalent to DK_INTERACTION_FINGERPRINT_MISMATCH.
• Idea-brief approval bound to discovery revision/fingerprint. PR fix(reliability): v0.9.1 field hardening and IDEA authority persistence #35 invalidated approval when discovery state changed; no equivalent current IDEA state module was found.
• Runtime design-disposition binding from the IDEA workflow. Current Design Authority remains a separate subsystem, but the old branch's discovery-to-design disposition contract is not present as an IDEA runtime workflow.

Disposition

The audit is therefore not a simple supersession: several PR #35 protections remain valuable and are absent or weaker in current v0.11.1.

Required current-generation implementation

Port the missing behavior as a new bounded v0.11.1+ change, using current architecture rather than copying the old branch wholesale:

1. Add a current-generation persisted IDEA discovery/workflow state model.
2. Make requirement origin/provenance and authority transitions explicit and fail-closed.
3. Persist the exact pending interaction before asking it.
4. Require exact interaction fingerprint when consuming the reply.
5. Add append-only replay protection.
6. Add crash-safe resume/journal semantics.
7. Bind final Idea Brief approval to current discovery/source fingerprints.
8. Integrate Design Authority disposition without allowing caller-supplied mock state.
9. Preserve the current Numbered Decision Interface rather than replacing it.
10. Add adversarial regression tests before closing this issue.

Evidence retained

Historical implementation and regression suite remain available on PR #35/head bbb55e9ceaa819620f0e6ea52848499b94ed69bb. Use them as behavioral evidence, not as a merge candidate.

[eybersjp]

IDEA authority hardening has been rebuilt on the current architecture and merged via PR #54.

Verification evidence:

• PR fix: harden IDEA authority, persistence and replay protection #54 head: cc9717e8d7ec711fbecc4733dd20fe6fa152c202
• CI run: 36828558754
• Ubuntu full release validation: success
• Windows full release validation: success
• IDEA authority adversarial suite: 12/12 passed
• Merge commit on main: 40377ba875319c02781a434c8c5278c34fd2be16

Delivered protections include explicit requirement provenance/authority transitions, one persisted interaction at a time, exact interaction fingerprints, stale-source rejection, hash-chained replay protection, crash-safe discovery journaling, Product Owner-bound design disposition, source-bound Idea Brief approval, direct-edit invalidation, explicit authority for suggestion promotion, fresh-process rehydration and corruption fail-closed tests.

Historical PR #35 remains archival evidence only and was not merged directly.