The surveyor forge-guard adapter is declared unconditionally required but documented as conditionally installed #161

🤖 Generated by the Agentic Engineer

Evidence

The agentic-engineering provider-neutral desired state declares scripts/surveyor-forge-readonly.sh as an unconditional entry in spec.source.requiredRuntimeAssets, while the onboarding text in the same document instructs a consumer to install that adapter conditionally — quoting it:

plus scripts/surveyor-forge-readonly.sh only where the runtime presents a candidate command as structured JSON on standard input rather than as an argument

Measured at 439f4eee (plugin 4.4.12), resources/provider-neutral.desired-state.json:

Problem and who it affects

A consuming deployment reads that array as an allow-list and requires every entry to be present in the installed copy. So a runtime without full plugin support that presents candidate commands as arguments — exactly the case the onboarding text tells to omit the adapter — is instructed to omit a file that the manifest simultaneously declares mandatory.

Such a deployment is then permanently unable to report its definitions as current, no matter how correctly it is configured: the omission the text asked for is the drift the manifest reports. The two remedies are mutually exclusive as written, so a consumer cannot satisfy both.

This was surfaced by a Codex review (P2) on the consuming rollout PR devantler-tech/monorepo#3040 and independently confirmed against the consumer's own currency checker, which enumerates spec.source.requiredRuntimeAssets and requires each entry in every non-Cursor installed copy.

Why it belongs here rather than in the consumer

The consumer copy is byte-identical to this document (sha256 1d561af23c622da23044548c2d439226d754738e23e38eee4484911b7cef9db1), and the consumer's delivery-contract test hashes that copy against the pinned submodule. Editing the copy to resolve the contradiction would both fail that test and silently fork a verbatim artifact from its source, so the contradiction has to be resolved at the authoring end.

Expected behaviour

The manifest and the onboarding text agree: either the adapter is unconditionally required for every runtime, or the manifest represents the condition explicitly so a consumer can evaluate it and a currency check can honour it.

Acceptance criteria

• The declaration and the onboarding text state the same requirement for scripts/surveyor-forge-readonly.sh.
• A conditional asset, if that is the chosen shape, is machine-readable rather than described only in prose.
• A correctly configured argument-passing fallback deployment can report CURRENT.
• Existing full-plugin consumers are unaffected — a negative control, since they install all three today.

Size

Small — a manifest/prose reconciliation, plus whatever conditional representation is chosen.