Drift: Evaluation Against a Declared Goal

By which star will you judge the wandering?

Drift evaluates how actual behavior and outcomes meet or depart from a declared goal. Each trial binds an exact subject revision to Cases and Rubrics that make the goal testable. Declared Evaluators judge retained observations, preserve uncertainty, and return only the findings the evidence supports. ADR 34 owns this evaluation jurisdiction.

That office carries no authority to execute unsafe work, select or grant an Animator, authorize spending, repair or mutate a subject, publish, train, or promote. Its findings become input to other owners, never their decision.

Drift is Designed; no runnable evaluation path is delivered. State of Work records its maturity boundary.

Make the goal testable

A workflow may deliver the right artifact while exceeding its declared budget or omitting a required check. Its Case and Rubric must name those obligations before execution. Drift then reports where behavior met, missed, or left the criteria unresolved, retaining the evidence for each finding. A later candidate can improve one dimension while regressing on another.

The same method applies to a first attempt: the declared goal supplies the reference. Historical comparison is optional, and several criteria need not collapse into one distance or score. Trials shows how to fix that reference before the result is known.

Execution is not verdict

Trial status records execution; claim verdict records what its evidence supports. A policy-blocked trial therefore cannot establish claim failure. Trials carries the status/verdict vocabulary and separates infrastructure, subject, and evaluator failures.

A Trial Suite (TrialSuite@1) groups Cases and evaluation controls; a Composition Suite coordinates separately owned applications. These remain separate contracts.

A favorable verdict supplies no permission, routing authority, causal proof, or automatic promotion.

Choose the evidence passage

Start with Trials when constructing versioned Cases, controls, observations, Rubrics, calibration, repetition, and immutable Outcomes.

When healthy Outcomes must become scoped, expiring evidence for Dispatcher, Toll, or Soulforge to consider under their own authority, continue to Capability claims.

Use Returning findings to trace a downstream failure across an exact Composition Suite and return inert evidence to the smallest supported boundary, without initiating reverse execution.

Drift locates the departure from the goal only as far as evidence reaches. The receiving owner decides whether and how to correct it.

For a complete worked method, Workflow improvement follows SDLC traces through a baseline/candidate comparison and an owner decision to keep, change or investigate the procedure. Ouroboros places that evaluation beside memory and training.