Essential outcomes
Essential Outcomes Card
Section titled “Essential Outcomes Card”Write-protected. Keep this open during the session.
What is graded
Section titled “What is graded”Engineering outcomes and evidence. Not whether your screen matches the facilitator’s.
Model wording, ordering and formatting will differ between people, and between two runs by the same person. That is normal and expected. We grade what you concluded, what you can show for it, and what you refused to do — never whether your response looks like anyone else’s.
If your agent phrases something differently, finds the same problem by another route, or returns its findings in a different order, you are not behind.
The eight outcomes
Section titled “The eight outcomes”By the end of the session your workspace should show:
- The context ledger identifies the contract drift between the two repositories, with evidence.
- The context ledger identifies the divergent business rule, and names which service owns it.
- At least one unknown remains unresolved rather than filled in with a plausible default.
- The specification preserves its out-of-scope list — nothing excluded got built.
- The plan defines repository boundaries and a compatibility rationale, not just a task list.
- The retry identity is stable across the seam — what one side sends is what the other deduplicates against.
- Duplicate semantics survive the seam — a duplicate reaches the caller as a duplicate.
- Pair verification is green, and you can say what that does and does not prove.
Two things that are outcomes, not failures
Section titled “Two things that are outcomes, not failures”A “no diff” result, with evidence, is a real outcome. Deciding that a repository is correct and proving it is engineering work. So is refusing to change something because it is out of scope, and recording why.
An unresolved question left visible beats a plausible answer invented to close it. In payments, guessing a threshold or a default is a business decision you were not authorised to make. Surfacing it is the correct move, and it is scored as such.
What this lab does not claim
Section titled “What this lab does not claim”The lab proves the represented seam locally. It does not claim the wider Meridian refund capability is production-ready, and pair verification does not replace integration testing or release governance.