v3.11 Roadmap (draft)

Status: DRAFT — candidate scoping inferred from open issues, not a commitment. Date: 2026-06-01 (just after v3.10.0). How this was built: the repo has no milestone mechanism; this draft is synthesized from the open-issue set as of v3.10.0 ship. Every item links its source issue. Priorities and final selection are the owner's call — this is a menu, not a plan of record.

Theme candidate: provenance + calibration hardening across artifact types — almost every mature open item EXTENDS existing machinery (claim decomposition, field-norm calibration, citation verification, instruction/data boundary) rather than introducing a greenfield system, which keeps v3.11 scope tractable. The alternative framing is a narrower citation-integrity release anchored on the one P0 (#182).

Tier 0 — ship-early, dependency-free (do regardless of theme)

The Co-Scientist design-lesson docs are S-scope, pure documentation, no code, no dependencies — and #223 (L4) updates the paper-derived issue template, which every future paper-derived sub-issue depends on. Landing these first costs little and unblocks the boundary discipline for everything else.

#220 Co-Scientist L1 — hidden-ranking red line (design-lesson doc)
#221 Co-Scientist L2 — feedback-propagation user-approval gate (design-lesson doc)
#222 Co-Scientist L3 — transferable vs non-transferable mechanisms (transfer matrix)
#223 Co-Scientist L4 — control-plane ownership (who may write / rank / route) + issue-template update
Parent epic: #219

Tier 1 — mature spec, no blocking deps, high leverage

Citation integrity (the one self-assessed P0)

#182 — Deterministic citation verification gate (Crossref/DOI/arXiv/PubMed lookup + source-text anchor; three status columns lookup_verified / anchor_present / reviewer_approved; a draft with any lookup_verified: false cannot reach "ready for human review"). Scope: L (new resolver module + caching + schema + tests). The #184 eval harness already left a hook ("verify_citation has not shipped — reconcile when it does"), so this closes a known forward-reference. Highest leverage in the citation cluster.
Note (raised in review): the gate FLAGS unverified citations (they stay visible — it is not hidden culling, so it does not cross the Co-Scientist L1 hidden-ranking red line). But "a draft cannot reach ready-for-review" is a deterministic block, and ARS philosophy is "the human decides at every gate." The #182 spec should state explicitly whether this block is hard (auto) or surfaced-for-human-override, so it reads as a flag-and-surface gate, not an AI culling decision. This is a #182 spec clarification, not a roadmap blocker.
#250 (non-blocking) — gold-set coverage gap: the false class is only exercised by fabricated tuples, not real-but-unindexed citations. Closing condition (a paper unmatched across all four resolvers) is hard to satisfy and may stay open; tracked, not committed.

Kim et al. peer-review failure modes (epic #217)

All four sub-issues have full specs naming exact files/lines.

#213 — Decompose multi-part claims before citation judgment (adds Step 0 sub-claim split + PARTIAL verdict; addresses the 76% partial-evidence error class). M
#214 — Sub-claim inventory before consensus aggregation in editorial_synthesizer (inventory primary key Weakness → sub_claim). Independently shippable from #213 (no hard blocking dependency), but coordinate the sub_claim shape/vocabulary with #213 — both introduce sub-claim-level reasoning at different layers (citation vs synthesis) and will drift if specced separately. Land them in one pass or share the schema. M
#215 — Field-norm severity calibration (domain_reviewer must cite external literature for field-norm claims; DA gains field_norm_boundary; calibration miscalibration histogram). M
#216 — Reviewer-type asymmetry parity audit in Devil's Advocate (4th anti-sycophancy rule). DA text change is S; the authorship-metadata design question splits off as a separate, larger decision — not required to ship the text change.

Kong et al. Tier A — ALL SHIPPED (no v3.11 work here; see stale-open cleanup below)

Cross-checked against git history (not just issue state): the entire Kong Tier A is already in v3.10, even though several issues are still OPEN. - A1 #256 — shipped (Schema 11 ledger + follow-ups #266/#268/#269). - A2 #257 — shipped via #270 feat: add idea-diversity advisories (commit 9f60d11, before the v3.10.0 tag). - A3 #258 — shipped via #267 feat: add version-family citation reconciliation (commit 48378bb, before the v3.10.0 tag). - A4 #259 — shipped (CLOSED).

→ #256 / #257 / #258 are open-but-shipped stale issues, NOT v3.11 work. See the stale-open cleanup item under Tier 2.

Opus 4.8 behavioral-signal cluster (recent, 2026-05-29)

#273 — Calibration may be optimistic under same-model / rubric-aware judging; recommend cross-model evaluation as opt-in "for best results" (epistemic framing, not a gate). S
#274 — Concise reviewer output + a behavioral check that hard boundaries / DA non-softening hold under 4.8 after user pushback (guidance + verification). S
#272 — Treat retrieved external content as data, not instructions. This is a separate, still-open SAFETY TRACK, not a low-cost guidance add. The #134 design spec (§ "open items", line ~138) is explicit: "#272 remains a separate, still-open safety track … #134 must NOT close #272 or claim any mitigation … revisit #272's home only when a concrete envelope substrate exists (Slice 3+)." Do NOT co-locate #272 with #134 or treat it as a quick guidance patch. If taken on in v3.11, it needs its own design pass on the instruction/data trust boundary — scope accordingly, or defer until the envelope substrate exists. (Resolved against the #134 spec text, which is explicit on this point.)

Tier 2 — deferred-from-v3.10 + hygiene (S each)

#160 — Move scripts/_test_helpers.py → tests/test_helpers.py (drop the sys.path hack across ~24 import sites). defer:v3.10.
#151 — Evaluate generic repo-hygiene CI (gitleaks / detect-secrets). defer:v3.10; scope explicitly constrained to avoid maintainer-specific rules in a public repo.
#138 — Parallelize OpenAlex + Crossref calls per entry in the migration script (ThreadPoolExecutor, ~halves backfill wait). Verify the script is still the right target post-v3.10.
#242 — venue_disclosure_policies.md ACL row: revisit canonical source (Admin Wiki URL returns HTTP 418 to curl → needs a CI link-checker exemption or alternate URL).
Stale-open issue cleanup (not feature work, but do it this cycle). Several Kong issues are OPEN but their implementation already shipped in v3.10 — git history confirms, even though the issues never got auto-closed: #256 (A1, via #266/#268/#269), #257 (A2, via #270 9f60d11), #258 (A3, via #267 48378bb), and #259/#263 (already CLOSED). Verify each against the merged work and close. Leaving them open distorts any future roadmap read (this very draft's first pass mis-scoped #257/#258 as v3.11 work because they looked open).

Tier 3 — needs an owner decision before scoping

#89 Item 7 — diff/patch revision mode. Ranked #1 by #89's own analysis as the highest- leverage unfiled work; no design doc, no dedicated issue. To take it on, write a spec first. Decide consciously: scope into v3.11 or defer.
#244 (external — TriggerMinds "Structural Limitations" critique). Not a proposal; a discussion thread. Its two actionable children — #246 (discipline-relative grading, also cross-linked from Kong A4 #259) and #247 (dual-use scope clarification) — already shipped and closed (#280 docs(#246,#247), Closes #246 / Closes #247). So #244 itself is now "verify residual discussion → likely close or re-scope," NOT waiting on children.

Explicitly NOT in v3.11 (per source epics)

Kong Tier B (#260 / #261 / #262) — the Kong epic #255 tags B-track as a v3.12 candidate, not v3.11. (B1 experiment provenance, B2 figure/table fidelity, B3 cross-paper contradiction — all have full specs and could be pulled forward, but the epic's own tiering puts them after v3.11.)
The anti-pattern non-features the source epics list as first-class rejections (autonomous idea generation, autonomous experiment execution, hidden ranking, open-ended self-play). These are boundary entries for POSITIONING.md / NEGATIVE_SCOPE.md, not features.

Open questions for the owner

Theme: broad "provenance + calibration hardening" (Kim subs + #182 + Opus-4.8 guidance) vs a narrow "citation-integrity release" (#182-centered)? Note Kong Tier A is already shipped, so the v3.11 substance is really #182 + Kim (#213-216) + the two Opus-4.8 guidance items (#273/#274), with the Co-Scientist docs as the cheap Tier 0 opener.
#272 (instruction/data boundary): the #134 spec quarantines it as a separate safety track needing an envelope substrate. Take it on in v3.11 as its own design pass, or defer until the substrate exists? (Do NOT fold it into general guidance.)
#89 Item 7 (diff/patch revision): the highest-leverage unfiled item — scope a design doc for v3.11, or defer?
Pull Kong Tier B (#260/261/262) forward? Specs are ready; only the epic's tiering holds them at v3.12.