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repo-scoping/docs/acceptance-policy.md

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# Characteristic Acceptance Policy Boundary
Policy version: `acceptance-policy/v1`
repo-scoping separates fact generation, quality gating, and acceptance
judgement. This boundary exists so deterministic automation can stay useful and
fast without silently promoting weak or non-native claims into registry truth.
## Boundary
Deterministic scanners and extractors may create observed facts, source refs,
content chunks, candidate abilities, candidate capabilities, candidate features,
and candidate evidence. They may also run transparent quality gates.
Deterministic quality gates may reject, invalidate, downgrade, merge, flag, or
require review when a criterion is formally expressible. They must record the
criterion identifier, outcome, rationale, and affected candidate element.
Deterministic quality gates must not approve candidate characteristics. No
deterministic rule, scanner result, fixture match, vocabulary match, confidence
threshold, source-role score, or duplicate check may mark a candidate as
approved registry truth.
Human reviewers may approve candidate characteristics.
Trusted agentic reviewers may approve candidate characteristics only after
inspecting the evidence, applying the active quality criteria, and recording a
rationale tied to those criteria and source refs.
All automated review outcomes must be inspectable, reversible, and auditable.
## Allowed Deterministic Outcomes
- `pass`: no formal criterion blocked the candidate; judgement is still pending.
- `requires_review`: a criterion found ambiguity that needs reviewer judgement.
- `downgraded`: the candidate remains visible but loses trust or native-utility
strength until a reviewer overrides or edits it.
- `rejected`: the candidate should not be accepted as stated, but remains
auditable with reason codes.
- `invalidated`: the candidate is structurally or evidentially unusable.
- `merged`: the candidate was folded into a better-supported equivalent.
- `flagged`: the candidate remains pending with a warning attached.
These outcomes may prepare a candidate for review. They do not approve it.
## Allowed Human Outcomes
- `approve`: accept the candidate as registry truth.
- `approve_with_edits`: accept after reviewer edits, relinks, or merges.
- `reject`: reject the candidate as a matter of judgement.
- `downgrade`: preserve the candidate but reduce its standing or native claim.
- `request_changes`: ask for edited wording, source refs, hierarchy placement,
or evidence.
- `request_human_review`: defer to another curator or domain owner.
## Allowed Agentic Outcomes
- `approve`: accept only with evidence-linked rationale and criteria version.
- `approve_with_edits`: accept after proposed edits, relinks, or merges are
recorded.
- `reject`: reject with cited criteria and evidence.
- `downgrade`: keep visible but lower trust or native-utility standing.
- `request_human_review`: stop automation when evidence or intent is ambiguous.
- `propose_edit`: suggest wording, hierarchy, source-ref, or merge changes
without approving.
Agentic approval requires:
- reviewer identity or configuration
- criteria version
- prompt or policy version when applicable
- evidence inspected
- rationale
- exact candidate elements affected
The repo-scoping service represents this as structured agentic review decisions.
Approval decisions are rejected unless they include rationale, criteria IDs, and
evidence refs. Non-approval decisions still require rationale and criteria IDs,
so downgrade, rejection, relink, proposed edit, and human-review requests remain
auditable.
## Legacy Auto-Approval Terminology
`trusted_auto_approve_candidate_graph` and UI labels such as "Trusted
auto-populate" are legacy terminology. They describe an existing migration-era
behavior, not an accepted policy direction. Future implementation must replace
that path with agentic review or leave candidates pending human review.
Until the migration in `RREG-WP-0014` is complete, any artifacts produced by the
legacy path must be identifiable in review decisions and self-scoping
assessment artifacts. They should be treated as review debt, not as evidence
that deterministic approval is allowed.
The migration inventory and rebuild procedure are documented in
`docs/migrations/trusted-auto-approval.md`.
## Quality Criteria Relationship
The quality criteria registry in `docs/quality-criteria/` defines the formal
checks deterministic gates may apply. Criteria should be versioned, reviewable,
and specific enough to explain why a candidate was rejected, downgraded,
invalidated, merged, flagged, or sent to review. The active registry can be
listed with `repo-scoping list-quality-criteria` or `GET /quality-criteria`.
Examples of criteria families:
- source-role quality
- native utility versus dependency, tooling, fixture, or mention-only context
- hierarchy fit between capability and feature
- evidence sufficiency
- circularity from generated `SCOPE.md`
- fixture and schema-example contamination
Criteria can block bad output before judgement. They cannot stand in for
judgement.