Machine-Native Complexity Development Specification

MNCDS is an open experimental specification for evidence-governed development of machine-native implementations.

MNCDS governs how machine-native implementations are created, evaluated, selected, released, monitored, regenerated, replaced, and retired. It is a companion to the Machine-Native Complexity Standard (MNCS), but it is independently versioned, governed, and released.

This repository is the canonical home of MNCDS 0.1-draft, MNCDS 0.1-rc.1, the development-record schemas, and the MNCDS-owned reference validator.

What belongs here

• development-process semantics and profiles (D1–D4)
• development records, authority, lineage, partitions, selection, release, monitoring, regeneration, and retirement
• MNCDS schemas, conformance vectors, and the mncds validator
• RFCs that change MNCDS meaning

What does not belong here

• MNCS implementation-evidence acceptance rules
• operator infrastructure such as MNCS Harness, MNCS Control MCP, MNCS Fabric, or MNCS Commons
• Forge workflows, RAVEL/MNEL research, or reference-study implementations

Those projects may produce MNCDS records. They do not own MNCDS meaning.

Core boundary

MNCS asks: What evidence supports acceptance of an implementation?

MNCDS asks: What development process produced, evaluated, selected, released, monitored, regenerated, replaced, or retired that implementation?

Those responsibilities interact through explicit, versioned bindings. Neither project silently owns or rewrites the other's normative meaning.

A reader can understand MNCS without first understanding this repository. MNCDS may require an MNCS result only when a record declares an MNCS binding.

Status

• Project: Machine-Native Complexity Development Specification
• Acronym: MNCDS
• Current specification line: 0.1
• Current release candidate: 0.1-rc.1
• Maturity: experimental / pre-1.0
• License: Apache-2.0
• Historical source: extracted from epi13/machine-native-complexity-standard commit f0088c4d46dec84f289d9b4417eec32b0ac028e6

See MIGRATION.md and INTEROPERABILITY.md.

Validate a record

python3 -m pip install -e '.[dev]'
mncds validate examples/mncds-0.1-rc/development-record.json --json
mncds validate examples/mncds-d4/development-record.json --require-pass

The validator checks the declared record and invariants. It does not launch generators, evaluators, models, Forge, Fabric, or Harness.

Repository map

• spec/ — normative MNCDS 0.1-draft and 0.1-rc.1 text
• schemas/ — versioned machine-readable MNCDS schemas
• examples/ — development-record examples
• conformance/ — MNCDS-owned corpora
• rfcs/ — proposals that change MNCDS meaning
• docs/ — architecture, rationale, and non-normative guidance
• src/mncds_validator/ — reference mncds CLI

Family relationships

Family orientation lives in MNCS Atlas. Atlas is descriptive.

Project	Relationship to MNCDS
MNCS	sibling standard for implementation-evidence acceptance
MNCS Forge	may produce or evaluate development evidence; not an authority
MNCS Validator (in MNCS / Rust)	may consume MNCDS records as a shared interface
MNCS Harness, Control, Fabric, Commons	operator/implementation ecosystem; not required by MNCDS
RAVEL / MNEL / Reference Studies	research and empirical work that may emit MNCDS records

Non-claims

MNCDS is experimental. It is not accredited certification, a security warranty, organizational independence, protected custody, or proof that a development process is safe or correct.