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Jon Chery 9bc37301ba docs(P4): trim word count + purge 'penetrate' repo-wide (REQ-271,272)

Targeted ~20-30% word-count trim on 8 verbose slides (1, 5, 7, 8, 13,
14, 20, appendix). Tables + short slides untouched. Spirit preserved.
Removed 'penetrate' (and derivatives) from docs/scope.md, docs/vision.md,
.ciagent/PROJECT.md, .ciagent/CLARIFY.md, .ciagent/NORTH_STAR.md, and
presentation files (G-001 binding revision). RESEARCH.md/PLAN.md/GRILL.md
exempt as decision-history. Slide 5 'penetrates' phrase removed with no
replacement (slide 4 Anti-Goals already excludes the PDLC).

---ci---
project: acdl
phase: 4
milestone: v1.23
status: execute
phase_role: execution
---/ci---

2026-08-12 00:26:37 +00:00

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Scope — Nova is Downstream of PDLC

This page is the citizen-developer-facing copy.

The Boundary

The Product Development Lifecycle (PDLC) is upstream of Nova. The PDLC includes:

Product backlog / roadmap planning
Code authorship (via AI coding agent, IDE, or agentic SDLC platform)
Sprint planning / issue tracking
Application business logic
IDE workflows / developer experience

Nova never reaches into the PDLC. Nova's domain is infrastructure + delivery only. Nova integrates with externally owned PDLC, SDLC, Agentic, and Citizen Developer platforms with no regard for the source of the intent: Nova provides a set of skills and MCP endpoints that help the developer or AI agent make their application production-grade, and all intents to deploy to production go through the same rigorous controls, quality gates, attestation, and evidence stream.

What Nova Does

Nova governs the downstream half:

Contract ingestion — the validated entry point
Submission-readiness gate — what is acceptable to start (schemas/submission-readiness.schema.json)
Policy enforcement — the confidence signal, Checkov, tagging
Cloud resource lifecycle — Terraform plan/apply, state, IAM
Environment progression — dev (autonomous) → qa (QA attestation) → prod (SRE attestation) → dr (SRE attestation)
Immutable audit + attestation — the Decision Ledger, the evidence stream, the HITL gates

The Integration Point

Integration between the PDLC and Nova is only through the validated, published contract boundary:

PDLC (upstream)                         Nova (downstream)
─────────────────                       ─────────────────
product backlog                         contract ingestion
code authorship (AI agent / IDE / SDLC) → submission-readiness gate
sprint planning                         → policy enforcement
application business logic              → cloud resource lifecycle
                                        → environment progression (dev→qa→prod→dr)
                                        → immutable audit + attestation

The citizen developer's AI coding agent, an upstream agentic SDLC platform, or any upstream development platform may all produce submissions. The source does not matter — all are subject to the same compliance standards. Nova validates the submission, not the author.

What Nova is Not

Not an upstream development platform (no product backlogs, IDE, code authorship).
Not a general-purpose AI agent platform (autonomy is narrow, bounded by policy envelopes).
Not a legacy infrastructure bridge (no VMs/bare metal/OS).
Not a permissive delivery highway (no escape hatches past confidence or HITL).
Not a mutable audit log (VCS history ≠ regulatory evidence).

These anti-goals (from docs/vision.md §7 and Core Tenet #2) are promoted here from buried tenets to an unmissable scope statement.

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