ADOPTION_PATH.md

# Adoption path

The target is official adoption, but that phrase has three distinct gates.

## Gate 1: reviewed distribution

Make a skills-only plugin installable through the official Plugins Directory.
Passing review would establish distribution eligibility, not technical
endorsement. Before this gate the candidate needs a deliberate license, public
repository, verified publisher identity, support material, and a current review
against the submission rules.

The license, verified individual publisher metadata, support documents,
reviewer cases, deterministic package builder, public hosting, live URLs,
listing art, and passing cross-platform CI are now present. The remaining work
at this gate is independent clean-checkout reproduction, final policy and region
selections, portal completion, and OpenAI review.

## Gate 2: upstream technical adoption

The version-pinned experiment now passes at the actual Codex import boundary.
It carries a real stable verifier digest and the tamper, ambiguity, expired
authority, and unexpired authority failure classes through the seam while
preserving ordinary Markdown compatibility and the prior imported copy. The
next gate is independent reproduction and a focused maintainer discussion about
the production contract: discovery, verifier ownership, attestation, errors,
and service wiring. The likely upstream unit remains a test, fixture, or
import-boundary rule—not this entire application. Prepare upstream production
code only when maintainers invite or request it.

## Gate 3: collaboration, employment, or acquisition

These outcomes require evidence beyond a local implementation: independent
users, repeatable eval results, maintenance quality, and constructive maintainer
interaction. They are not implied by plugin review or an upstream test.

## Current candidate exit criteria

Before any external action:

1. deterministic fixtures regenerate byte-for-byte;
2. all conformance and CLI tests pass offline;
3. authority replay is rejected independently of historical expiry;
4. ambiguous heads fail closed instead of selecting a claim;
5. privacy and secret scans pass;
6. a reviewer can reproduce the demo in minutes;
7. no claim says OpenAI has expressed interest, adopted, approved, or endorsed
   the project.

Publishing, contacting maintainers, opening an upstream issue, or submitting the
plugin are external-state actions. They must be recorded separately from local
conformance results and must never be described as OpenAI adoption before the
corresponding official action occurs.