Roadmap

Status: v1.0 corpus · community adoption Draft
Product: AIES — AI Engineering Standard
Updated: 2026-07-16
Repository: grvmithas/open-ai-engineering-standards

Purpose

This roadmap separates two things teams confuse:

Engineering corpus — do we already know how to run production AI delivery?
Community standard adoption — have external orgs validated, forked, and governed this together?

AIES already ships the corpus. The remaining roadmap is adoption, packaging, and governance — not inventing prompts, MCP, or AIDLC from scratch.

What is already shipped (corpus maturity)

Treat these as present, not “planned learning”:

Domain	Where it lives
Prompt engineering & XML contracts	`01-prompt-engineering/`
Context engineering, packing, progressive disclosure	`02-context-engineering/`, `handbook/how-to-give-context.md`
Skills vs prompts vs agents	`handbook/skills-vs-prompts-vs-agents.md`, `03-skill-engineering/`
Agent engineering, debug/planning skills	`04-agent-engineering/`, patterns + handbook
Multi-agent / orchestration	`05-multi-agent-systems/`
Memory, RAG, caching, poisoning defenses	`06-memory-knowledge/`
Evaluation, LLMOps, judges, gates	`07-llmops/`, `handbook/evals-as-quality-gates.md`
AIDLC / AI SDLC, HITL, modern coding vs vibe coding	`08-ai-sdlc/`, handbook planning/HITL/PR-review
MCP when/how + reference integrations	`handbook/mcp-when-and-how.md`, `mcps/`
Hooks, tokens, cost discipline	handbook chapters + LLMOps
New AIDLC roles & org operating model	`10-ai-org-playbook/`, `handbook/aidlc-roles-and-evolving-delivery.md`
Patterns (planner, reviewer, release, hotfix, …)	`patterns/`
Normative controls, SoA, conformance tooling	`standard/`, portal, schemas
Platform cookbooks (adapters)	`cookbook/`

Adoption track (what “next” actually means)

Track	Theme	Exit criteria	Status
A1	Corpus publish & site	Curated nav; handbook; portal; principles; honest positioning	Done
A2	Packaging & discoverability	Stable URLs; CONTRIBUTING usable by strangers; search index trustworthy	In progress
A3	External pilots	≥3 org pilots with published notes (what failed, what stuck)	Next
A4	Shared governance	RFC process live with non-steward reviewers; MAINTAINERS expanded	Planned
A5	Inter-assessor reliability	Two independent teams apply same SoA sample; disagreement notes published	Planned
S1.0	Community standard claim	A3–A5 met; no portfolio-hero positioning; versioned normative freeze	Future

Do not read A3–A5 as “we still need to invent MCP or evals.” Those practices are already in-repo.

Release philosophy

Corpus first — depth of working playbooks beats empty version theater.
Adoption is earned — “standard” means external critique and shared governance, not a badge on the homepage.
Evidence over slogans — pilots, checklists, and failing gates move the track — not page count.
Vendor neutral — no release may hard-require a single model vendor.

How to influence this roadmap

Open an issue or PR against this file with a concrete adoption exit criterion.
Prefer pilot evidence and failing checklists over “add another planned version for X we already documented.”
See Contributing.

Anti-patterns for this roadmap

Listing shipped capabilities as “Planned” (misrepresents maturity)
Declaring community-standard S1.0 because the docs site looks finished
Adding 100 empty pages to inflate “coverage”
Pinning the standard to one vendor’s API surface

Changelog

2026-07-16: Reframed roadmap — corpus shipped; adoption track replaces false “planned invent” versions.
2026-07-16: Initial Draft framing published (superseded).