Binding Product Owner release-scope decision — 13 October 2026

Decision: DELIVER v0.12.0 WITHOUT T04 STATE ENGINE V2. T04, its pending-journal, migration/restore and Windows crash/power-loss assurance are explicitly deferred as the highest priority feature of v0.13.0, retaining their original acceptance/security requirements and full Windows legacy-backup restoration support when implemented. Do NOT mark T04 ACCEPTED, do NOT merge its branch into v0.12.0, and do NOT silently ship partial T04 migrations as part of v0.12.

v0.12.0 now targets approved T01 Cost Observatory, T02 Workspace Target Engine, T03 Execution Capsules/Context Cache, T05 Lifecycle Instances, T06 Discovery/Re-entry, T07 Gate Profiles, T08 Verification SDK, T09 Complexity Delta Guard, T10 truthful Control Center, and existing v0.11 stable state store.

Architecture: T05–T10 must be verified against stable v0.11 state semantics/adapter, not T04 canonical-event ledger. If a feature requires T04 to work safely, either implement a tested compatibility adapter using the existing accepted state authority, or truthfully exclude that feature from this release with an explicitly approved narrower scope; do not claim a feature works using hardcoded healthy/accepted flags.

Acceptance rescope: Replace the original 10-task / 40-criterion planned v0.12 release gate with an explicitly revalidated release-specific contract that lists included criteria and exclusions (including T04's AC-012–015 and any directly dependent performance claims such as AC-034). Retain mandatory independent verification, adversarial false-acceptance tests, security/design governance and source staleness; never reassign missing T04 evidence to T05 or waive the safety of included features. Preserve historical T04 contracts and receipts with BLOCKED/DEFERRED status without modification.

Priority v0.13.0: Complete T04 State Engine V2, including full Windows crash-durable legacy-backup restore/recovery, hardware/filesystem evidence, independent three-role risk-3 source-bound reviews, cross-platform CI and deterministic acceptance. Existing Issue #73 is not closed or weakened; hostile same-UID malicious writer deferral remains separate Issue #72. v0.13 starts with T04 ahead of other new features.

Delivery: Create clean v0.12 release branch from accepted T03 and selectively port T05–T10 (not T04), integrate source and documentation, run real Windows+Ubuntu CI with all included contracts/tests and comparative benchmarks, and independently review. Update version/changelog/install docs. Publish GitHub/npm v0.12.0 through the existing repository workflow once verified, as expressly requested by the Product Owner. Never publish from the T04-descendant stacked branch.

Status: This issue records authorization; actual source/CI/publishing evidence must be separately verified.