Sprint 23 Design — Baseline Lock + Narrative Surface

Date: 2026-03-22 Status: Approved Author: Matt Faherty Owner: Matt Faherty (sole executor unless otherwise assigned)

Governing Rule

A task is only "done" when repo state, board state, and narrative state agree.

This is the whole sprint in one line. Sprint 23 is not a velocity sprint. It is a legitimacy sprint. The measure of success is convergence, not coverage.

Context

ICN just closed two major internal-hardening arcs simultaneously:

• Meaning Firewall (Sprints 19–22): All hardcoded policy constants extracted to typed config structs across icn-security, icn-compute, icn-ledger, icn-obs. Fully merged.
• Pilot Completion (#1099) and Vertical Slice (#1147): All tracks closed. Only 3 issues remain across both epics (#1095, #1096, #1131).

The system is operationally healthy: cluster green, cargo check passes, gateway stack reachable. But the repo is slightly lying. The sprint board shows work as "in-review" that is already merged. main is red from a non-blocking CI job. One dirty file and a stale worktree remain from the skills rewrite merge.

The danger at this inflection point is not lack of work. It is diffusion. Entering a new expansion wave (Commons Compute, Naming, Federation) before restoring repo truth would stack new architecture on a narratively blurry foundation.

Sprint 23 addresses this directly.

Theme

Baseline Lock + Narrative Surface

Turn current completion into a stable, legible, demoable platform baseline. Do the work that makes everything else easier to trust, demo, explain, and sequence.

Sprint 23 Tasks

Track A — Operations Closure

Make the repo tell the truth.

s23-t1 — Fix Test Coverage CI failure on main

• Acceptance: Test Coverage failure resolved; main passes all required non-observational gates, or remaining failures are explicitly classified as non-blocking with rationale committed to ops/state/ci-exceptions.md. ("Non-observational gates" = gates with GATE_RATCHET_PHASE_*: blocking or warning in ci.yml; excludes gates marked observational, flaky preview deployments, and advisory telemetry jobs.)

s23-t2 — Resolve dirty file in icn/ (from #1394 skills rewrite merge)

• Acceptance: git status is clean on main. The dirty file is either committed with a rationale commit message, or deleted. Stash is not an acceptable resolution — it is not a portable terminal state.

s23-t3 — Remove stale 1310-execution-receipt-gate worktree

• Acceptance: icn-wt/ contains no detached or branchless worktree entries. Stale branch pruned or deleted.

s23-t4 — Formally close Sprint 22

• Artifact: ops/state/sprint/current.json (sprint board source of truth)
• Acceptance: Sprint 22 state reconciled across board + ops/state/sprint/current.json + merged issue disposition on GitHub. All five s22 tasks marked done. Sprint board closed. No "in-review" state pointing at already-merged PRs.

Track B — P0 Residue Closure

Remove the dangling caveats.

Runs in parallel with Track A. Does not block Track A.

s23-t5 — #1095 CRDT OrSet + LwwRegister implementation

• Acceptance: #1095 (CRDT OrSet + LwwRegister) is merged, explicitly deferred with documented rationale committed, or decomposed into bounded child tasks with named ownership and acceptance criteria. No ambiguity about disposition.

s23-t6 — #1096 ContainerRuntime trait interface

• Acceptance: #1096 (ContainerRuntime trait) is merged, explicitly deferred with documented rationale committed, or decomposed into bounded child tasks with named ownership and acceptance criteria. No ambiguity about disposition.

s23-t7 — #1131 Storage Specification — Storage is Governance

• Acceptance: Written spec merged to docs/, issue closed or explicitly deferred with rationale committed. Independent of t5/t6 — proceed in parallel.

Track C — Baseline Narrative

Convert technical truth into portable truth.

These are first-class sprint tasks, not documentation exhaust. They are synthesis tasks that convert technical closure into institutional legibility. Their visibility on the board is intentional: it signals that "explaining the system clearly" is part of the sprint's definition of done.

Each has hard dependency relationships to the Track A/B work it crystallizes.

s23-t8 — Publish current platform baseline

• Depends on: s23-t1, s23-t2, s23-t3, s23-t4 (operational truth fully restored before doc is authored)
• Artifact: docs/state/ICN-Platform-Baseline-2026-03.md
• Acceptance: One document exists that answers: what ICN is now, what is complete, what is in progress, what is next. A new contributor can orient from this document without requiring oral tradition.

s23-t9 — Roadmap + sprint-state refresh

• Depends on: s23-t4 (Sprint 22 closed), s23-t7 (P0 tail disposition known)
• Artifacts:
  • docs/strategy/ICN-Roadmap-Live.md (update in place; create Sprint 23 section if absent)
  • ops/state/sprint/current.json (Sprint 23 tasks populated — distinct from s23-t4 which closes Sprint 22 in this file)
• Acceptance: ICN-Roadmap-Live.md updated to reflect post-Sprint-22 completion state. ops/state/sprint/current.json contains the Sprint 23 task list (separate from Sprint 22 closure handled by s23-t4). Sprint 24 candidate backlog listed with at least the Commons Compute trio (#925, #947, #964) shaped as candidates — meaning: title, one-line scope description, and rationale only. No full decomposition required. Full Sprint 24 planning is out of scope for this task.

s23-t10 — Validate and document canonical demo path

• Depends on: s23-t5, s23-t6 (P0 disposition must be known so the demo doc can explicitly state what is included and what is deferred. Note: #1095 CRDT OrSet and #1096 ContainerRuntime are not on the critical path for Flows A, B, or C — they are post-demo completion items. The dependency is about disposition documentation, not flow enablement.)
• Artifact: docs/demo-path-2026-03.md
• Acceptance: One document with exact commands to reproduce the current demo on main. Tested against reality, not aspiration. Covers at minimum: devnet startup, Flow A (WASM), Flow B (discovery), Flow C (treasury governance). Includes a brief "scope note" stating the current disposition of #1095 and #1096 and confirming they do not affect these three flows.

Dependencies

t1 ─┐
t2 ─┼──▶ t8 (baseline doc)
t3 ─┤
t4 ─┘

t4 ──────────────────────────────────────────────▶ t9 (roadmap refresh)
t7 ──────────────────────────────────────────────▶ t9

t5 ─┬────────────────────────────────────────────▶ t10 (demo path)
t6 ─┘

t7  (independent — runs in parallel with t5/t6)

What Is Explicitly Out of Scope

Sequencing

1. Track A + B in parallel — restore operational truth, close P0 tail
2. Track C — synthesize and publish; closes the sprint
3. Sprint 24 opens around Commons Compute expansion

The sprint is done when all 10 tasks reach their acceptance criteria and the governing rule holds: repo state, board state, and narrative state agree.

Proposed Sprint Cadence Beyond Sprint 23