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type: adr id: adr-0066 status: accepted created: 2026-06-11 updated: 2026-06-11

ADR-0066 — Checks: the adopter validity bar and the producer-internal reference values

Context

A conformance regime sized for a language ecosystem (document-copy clauses, count acceptance checks, maturity ladders) reads as gatekeeping to adopters (O-004, O-012 §3) — while the underlying test data (fixtures with pinned expectations, a labeled prose corpus) is genuinely valuable to the tooling that checks specs.

Decision

1. Adopter validity bar (the whole of it): a workspace is valid when it has (a) a populated AGENTS.md (soft length guidance), (b) the core templates present, and (c) at least one spec satisfying the core checks of docs/reference/checks.md. Nothing else is required; no document-copy clause; no maturity ladder.
2. Evidence rules survive verbatim (checklist level): non-empty-paste — a completion claim binds to pasted output or a CI link, never a bare "tests passed" — the failure illustrated (small-N, preliminary) by [EVIBOUND]; no-open-critical — work is not closed with an open blocking question.
3. Reference values are producer-internal. The closed-set cardinalities and their reconciliation checks live only in conformance/README.md (producer note) and the cheatsheet appendix. Adopter-facing pages list values, never counts.
4. The corpus is "checks fixtures": test data for docs/reference/checks.md, consumed by corpus-cli. Fixtures pin expected results per the two-way severity split (hard error / warning); each spec-format fixture domain ships a simple/SOL equivalence pair asserting both surfaces encode the identical requirement record (the anti-fork proof), plus intake, change-plan, and inventory fixtures.

Alternatives considered

Alternative	Why weaker
Keep the three-clause definition + ladder	Measures adopters against producer concerns; the reports name it as friction
Drop fixtures	corpus-cli loses its oracle; the checks contract becomes untestable

Consequences

Positive: "valid" is answerable in one breath. Negative: producers carry the reconciliation burden explicitly (where it belongs).

Status

Accepted. Partially supersedes ADR-0026 and ADR-0051 (validity-bar clauses) and ADR-0033 (corpus framing); refines ADR-0063.

Propagation

conformance/ (README, yaml, fixtures), checks.md, cheatsheet appendix, evals, corpus-cli.

Ledger note (2026-06-12): the checks fixtures' home renamed to checks/ by ADR-0070; step-output scoring became the step-bars reference page per ADR-0071.