Planning Commitment Horizon — Implementation Plan

Objective

Implement #67 as a small deterministic planning-admission and rebalance-frontier contract layered on existing NovelForge planning primitives. Do not introduce a second active-plan database or any Canon authority.

Phase 0 — authority and overlap

• Base the branch on an exact current main commit.
• Treat current plan.reconcile, scenario_fork, #63 propagation debt, Context, Canon/Settlement, and semantic-worker contracts as existing owners.
• Keep #65 an optional opaque-reference integration only; this branch must build and run if #65 is not merged.

Phase 1 — portable region/policy contract

Create harness/planning_horizon.py and a machine schema.

The deterministic contract should support:

1. canonical fingerprinting of policy/region artifacts;
2. small fixed planning-depth registry and known artifact-kind mapping;
3. region creation/validation with open|soft|hard strength and a depth ceiling no greater than the selected profile policy allows;
4. realization admission for a registered artifact kind;
5. explicit CAS horizon transition with allowed actor classes and evidence refs;
6. one-wave rebalance-frontier selection from explicit dependency evidence;
7. authority=false on every artifact/result and no model execution.

Phase 2 — deterministic regressions

Self-test at minimum:

• soft/beat blocks chapter detail;
• hard/chapter-detail permits chapter plan when profile permits;
• unknown artifact kind fails closed;
• writer cannot promote;
• authorized planner/user can promote with exact before state;
• stale version/fingerprint fails;
• identical retry is deterministic and does not create hidden write authority;
• non-adjacent linked dependency is selected;
• adjacent unlinked dependency is excluded;
• assumption-scoped dependency only triggers when changed assumptions intersect;
• frontier result performs no reconcile/debt/Canon operation;
• tight-short and discovery profile counterexamples are both representable.

Phase 3 — dedicated CI first

Add a dedicated workflow that:

• compiles the tool;
• validates schema JSON;
• runs self-test;
• asserts authority/no-model/no-auto-action invariants;
• uploads the deterministic receipt.

Do not modify HARNESS/docs/normal CI until this workflow passes on the real GitHub runner against the current repository.

Phase 4 — Framework integration

After dedicated CI is green:

• register the tool/schema in HARNESS_MANIFEST.yaml;
• make the dedicated workflow reusable and a normal-CI job;
• add any reusable-contract invocation needed by the current repository architecture;
• register bilingual spec/plan/tasks in documentation governance;
• preserve all concurrently developed Product/Studio files from current main.

Phase 5 — semantic capability/counterexample eval

Use existing NovelForge blind eval infrastructure. Add profile-boundary cases such as:

• capability: a serialized novel has only a soft far-future arc role, but a planner tries to generate detailed chapter plans several arcs ahead. Expected route: block/escalate for horizon promotion rather than silently concretize.
• counterexample: a short mystery has an explicit user requirement for a fully plotted 12-chapter structure before drafting. Expected route: allow a profile that hard-plans the whole work rather than forcing artificial softness.
• counterexample: a discovery-writing profile deliberately keeps even the next chapter’s later scenes soft. Expected route: preserve soft planning rather than automatically promoting because the material is near-term.

Missing independent model capability must remain PENDING_MODEL, not be converted into self-scored PASS.

Phase 6 — promotion review

Before merge/promotion:

• verify exact-head deterministic workflows;
• verify semantic evidence or leave PR Draft if semantic evidence remains pending;
• confirm no Project/Canon/manuscript changes;
• confirm no hidden dependency on #65;
• confirm rollback is deletion/disable of horizon enforcement without data migration;
• compare latest main again and preserve concurrent Product/Studio work.