clawmates/docs/TEMPLATE-MATURITY.md

Template maturity — what our agents can actually be asked to do

A review of the 6 workflow recipes and 12 team templates, on 2026-09-22. Graded by evidence, not by what the TOML declares: a recipe is mature when a mission built from it has completed and something checked the result.

Workflow recipes

recipe	phases	standing check	staffing	grade
research_and_code	2 (research → coding)	13 harness scenarios	research→topic_research, coding→rust_sdlc	Proven
research_only	1 (research, repo-less)	2 scenarios	topic_research	Proven
security_hardening	3 (scan → research → coding)	1 scenario	+rust_sdlc	Exercised
benchmark	1	1 scenario	rust_sdlc	Exercised
refactor	1	1 scenario	rust_sdlc	Exercised
continuous_research	2 (analysis → script)	none	continuous_research	Runs live, unguarded

research_and_code is the workhorse: every delivery, gate, judge, memory and triage scenario is built on it, so it is re-proven on every harness run. research_only earned its grade differently — its staffing was measured and corrected: under the old rust_sdlc default it delivered 5 roles, 14 skill deliveries and ~50 KB of prompt with 1 of 9 skills applicable; on topic_research it is 3 roles, 4 deliveries, 24 KB, 4 of 4.

continuous_research is the outlier and the one to fix first. It has the most moving parts of any recipe — harvest → triage → manifest → analysis → ranking → script → episode.json → vault commit — it ran twice today and produced real output both times, and nothing in the harness would notice if it broke tomorrow. Every other recipe has a standing check; this one has operator attention, which is not the same thing.

What the recipes declare that does not fire

phase_config::DECLARED_BUT_UNREAD is the honest list, and recipes lean on it:

key	used by	status
loop	research_and_code (until_no_more_int_items), refactor (single_pass)	inert — iteration is max_iterations + done_when
produces	almost every recipe (["md"])	inert — artifact rendering is not driven by it
input_from_phase	security_hardening	inert — phases share a checkout
mcp_bundles (phase level)	security_hardening	inert — bundles come from the TEAM template

None of this is hidden: security_hardening.toml carries a "what is real here and what is decoration" section and annotates its own dead keys inline. That is the right pattern and the other five should copy it. The risk is not the dead keys themselves — it is that a reader takes loop = "until_no_more_int_items" for a loop.

Team templates

All 12 are structurally sound and every declared skill resolves to a real file — 0 unbound across all of them, which is the skill-binding-repair work holding (it was 55 of 85 dangling once).

team	slots	risk profile	skills	evidenced?
rust_sdlc	planner coder tester reviewer committer	coding_readwrite	19	yes — harness default
topic_research	lead_researcher evidence_checker report_writer	research_web_readonly	4	yes — measured
continuous_research	paper_reader signal_ranker script_writer	research_readonly	11	yes — live runs
backend	api_designer db_engineer coder tester committer	coding_readwrite	20	no
frontend	designer coder tester committer	coding_readwrite	12	no
mobile	designer coder tester committer	coding_readwrite	11	no
gpu	arch_analyst kernel_author bench_engineer coder committer	coding_readwrite	13	no
threejs	scene_designer coder shader_author perf_engineer committer	coding_readwrite	13	no
codebase_research	code_archeologist architecture_mapper flow_tracer vault_scribe	research_readonly	11	no
papers_research	domain_scout paper_reader library_curator	research_web_readonly	8	no
insight_research	implementation_tracker novelty_hunter publication_drafter	research_readonly	8	no
continuous_improvement	brain_inspector improvement_proposer improvement_evaluator	research_readonly	7	no

Three of twelve are evidenced. The other nine are well-formed scaffolding: roles, prompts, brain seeds and resolving skills, and no run behind any of them. They will probably work — they are structurally identical to the three that do — but "probably" is the word, and this codebase has a name for the gap between a thing being wired and a thing being proven.

Five of the nine need something we do not have: frontend, mobile, threejs and gpu target stacks with no repository in the harness to point them at, and insight_research needs a vault plus commit history. Those are blocked on a target, not on the template. The remaining four — codebase_research, papers_research, continuous_improvement, backend — could be exercised against repositories we already have.

What this means we can ask for today

With confidence: a repo-backed research→code loop on a Rust project, with a judge, a commit gate, a verifier subagent and delivery to a branch. A repo-less research report with sourced claims. Both are re-proven on every harness run.

With supervision: a security scan and plan, a benchmark, a refactor. Each has completed once under a standing check; none has the depth of evidence the first two have.

With attention: continuous research. It works, it produced two good digests today, and it has no guard.

Not yet: anything staffed from the other nine teams. Nothing is known to be wrong with them; nothing is known to be right either.

The two things worth doing next

1. A continuous-research harness scenario. The recipe with the most moving parts is the only one with no standing check, and it now also carries the paper triage (kind + evidence). A scenario that launches it, waits, and asserts the manifest has tags and a spread, analysis.md covers every paper, and episode.json parses would turn operator attention into a guard.
2. Exercise the four unblocked teams once each, against repositories we already have, and record what came out. Not to prove them mature — one run is not maturity — but to find out whether they run at all, which nobody currently knows.