Surface adapter: Conduit flows — seed a fixture card, assert the outputs

[queso]

Part of making FlowSpec the universal spec substrate for the A(i)-Team execution stage (theaiteam-dev/the-ai-team-plugin#51, PRD 010): one immutable steps/expect grammar, per-surface adapters. Web exists (agent-browser); CLI adapter has its own issue. This issue: Conduit-flow surface.

Context

Conduit flows are already fixture-driven (e.g. nitpick-flow runs against seeded cards; example flows run against duckdb fixtures). What's missing is a declarative, agent-immutable statement of what a green run means — today that definition lives in mutable test code, which is exactly the "agent fixes the test instead of the bug" hole FlowSpec exists to close.

Sketch

name: review-fanout-produces-findings
description: Seeded PR card fans out reviewers and coordinator emits a verdict
surface: conduit
steps:
  - seed: fixtures/sample-pr-card.json
  - run_flow: flow.yaml
expect:
  - card_field: {path: "$.verdict", in: ["approve", "reject", "rework"]}
  - file_exists: "{owned_dir}/findings.json"
  - json_file: {path: "{owned_dir}/coverage.json", field: "$.dnf_children", equals: 0}
  - station_completed: coordinate
  - no_station_failed: true

Proposed verbs / assertions

Steps	Assertions
seed: <fixture card path>	card_field: {path, equals/in/matches}
run_flow: <flow.yaml> (kernel invocation)	file_exists: / json_file: {path, field, equals} (owned-dir aware)
env: {KEY: val}	station_completed: <name> / no_station_failed
budget: {max_tokens} optional guard	coverage: {dnf_children: 0} sugar

Design notes

• Adapter shells out to the Conduit kernel (conduit run flow.yaml against the seeded card) and reads the run's output dirs/journal — no new orchestration, just declarative assertions over what the kernel already emits.
• {owned_dir} templating resolves per-run output scoping (conduit-harness #92 conventions).
• Nondeterminism: LLM-station outputs assert on shape/schema/enums, not exact text — the grammar should encourage matches/in/schema-ish checks for transform stations and exact checks for deterministic stations.
• Same immutability hook: specs/ protected, so flow behavior contracts can't be quietly loosened by the agents building the stations.

Why

Gives conduit-surface repos (conduit-harness, nitpick-flow, arcane/autocut flows) the same graduation path as web: DoD → protected spec → CI, feeding the earned-auto-merge ladder in PRD 010.

[queso]

This adapter is now sequenced as C.2 in the WIP-drain / trust-infrastructure plan (2026-08-12): one Conduit adapter unblocks e2e coverage for nitpick-flow, decker, content, market-flow, and the autocut flows — the largest single-repo-count unlock in the e2e surface map. Ordering: after print-farm FlowSpec init (queso/print-farm#72), before the CLI adapter (#6). Shape-not-text assertions for LLM stations as originally specced.