Roadmap

What's next, what's deferred, what's deliberately not coming. AE 3.0 ships lean on purpose — the anti-goals section explains why several "obvious" features are absent. Three time horizons follow.

3.1 fast-follow

Things 3.0 is designed for and that should land within weeks of 3.0:

• Polished ae status cockpit UI. The current report is honest but plain. 3.1 adds proper formatting, color, paging, and a --watch mode for ae artifact verify that's friendly inside a terminal split next to the editor.
• Pre-commit hook recipes. A small set of recipes for git pre-commit / pre-push that run ae artifact verify --strict against the artifacts touched by the commit, so Tier 1+2 gaps fail before they merge.
• Cursor-flavored Claude Code plugin equivalent. Same shape as plugins/claude-code-ae-plugin/, adapted to Cursor's command and skill conventions. See Claude Code plugin.
• Multi-pack distillation. ae canonical distill --from-artifact a,b,c --concept <slug> so a canonical can be seeded from several language implementations at once, increasing the chance the distilled features are genuinely language-neutral.
• Agent-delegated artifact→canonical scaffolding (LLM variant). Heuristic ae canonical scaffold --from-artifact <pack> shipped in 3.1.0-alpha.1; 3.1 adds an LLM-assisted variant for the cases where pure heuristics undershoot.
• ae status --pack-level invariant evidence. Today Tier 1 says "no test asserts this"; 3.1 attaches the evidence — which test files were searched, what patterns were tried — so users can act on the finding without a separate hunt.

3.2 / 3.x

Larger pieces that need their own design rounds but are firmly on the trajectory:

• Auto package-hub discovery. The resolver already supports <pkg>/.ae_hub/canonical/. 3.x walks installed packages automatically and offers to pull canonicals into the project hub. Until then, ae canonical import is the manual path.
• ae canonical migrate. Automated upgrade of artifacts to a newer canonical snapshot. Orthogonal to the "no migration from old know/ layout" decision in spec §9 — that one is hard-cut on purpose; this one is canonical-version migration only, and is much smaller in scope.
• JS/TS heuristic extractor. The HeuristicExtractor interface is stable; a JS/TS adapter is the most-requested addition.
• Python and Go heuristic extractors. Same interface, different manifest parsers.
• Public canonical hub. Pack format is publishable today (deterministic IDs, attribution required, no machine-specific paths). The remote sharing system itself needs a separate design doc covering hosting, trust, signing, and discovery.

Post-3.x

Genuinely longer-horizon, dependent on the world catching up or on real demand materializing:

• Cross-language code generation. "Same canonical, multiple language implementations" is the seed. Going from canonical-to-Rust-port-of-this-Dart-package requires LLMs that are credibly capable of idiomatic non-trivial ports, which they aren't reliably in 2026. Watch the space; revisit when it changes.
• Multi-repo workspaces. One .ae_hub/ per repo today; cross-repo aggregation deliberately not in 3.0. If multi-repo becomes a real bottleneck for solo devs maintaining several engines, this comes back.
• Dgraph (or other graph backend). Filesystem packs already model a graph via stable IDs and references. If cross-pack graph queries become valuable enough to justify the operational cost of a graph DB, the storage adapters from Adapters make it a swap, not a rewrite.
• Team / shared hub / RBAC. AE 3.0 is solo-dev focused. Shared hubs are a different product surface; designing for teams without solo-dev nailed first is how you ship neither.
• Agent-teams integration. Claude Code's agent-teams primitives are interesting; AE could plausibly orchestrate distillation across a team of subagents. Reserved for post-3.x once the basics have landed.

Anti-goals

Things AE 3.0 deliberately does not ship, and why:

• Cross-language code generation today. See above. The matrix-as-language-neutral-spec is the seed; full generation is post-3.x.
• Auto-sync between code and canonical. Drift visibility is honest; auto-sync would lie. Drift detection stays; auto-sync stays out.
• Public canonical hub. Format is publishable; the system isn't designed yet.
• Multi-repo workspaces. One hub per repo.
• Team / sharing flows. Solo-dev focus.
• Dgraph or any graph backend. Filesystem packs already model the graph.
• Auto package-hub discovery (yet). Manual ae canonical import is the 3.0 path.
• Migration from 2.x know/ layout. Hard cut. Old hubs error out with clear instructions; back up and re-run ae init.

Surprises

Running list of spec-vs-code deltas the 3.0 docs site flags:

• ae mcp as a subcommand of ae (spec §12) is not in cli.dart. The MCP server ships as the separate agentic_executables_mcp binary.

Where to next

• Concepts — the four crystallizations that frame all of this.
• Walkthroughs — what 3.0 does ship, end-to-end.