Roadmap

Last updated: 2026-08-27 · Current release: 1.0.0-beta.1 (2026-08-23)

This page mirrors ROADMAP.md in the repository; if they differ, the repository wins.

Note

This roadmap is a statement of direction, not a commitment. No item on this page carries a date. Items move between sections, get merged, or get dropped as work and feedback dictate. Affiant is maintained by one person, so the honest unit of planning is what is being worked on now, not when it will land. Nothing on this page should be relied on for a purchasing or architecture decision — read Beta status first.

What Affiant is

Affiant is a .NET framework that turns every AI-proposed database write into an Evidence Card — a per-write review record placed on a Docket, the queue of cards awaiting a human decision — carrying an Affidavit, a per-field record of where each value came from and how confident the framework is in it. It attaches to an agent framework through an adapter — Semantic Kernel, Microsoft Agent Framework or Microsoft.Extensions.AI — and two first-party host applications, Meridian (the live public demo) and HR Portal, exercise it end to end. See the README and affiant.dev for the full picture.

How this roadmap works

Items sit in one of four statuses:

• Now — the current focus: what is in flight and what starts next. At most four items, so the list stays honest. Four items in Now does not mean four in parallel: it is the working set, and items inside it land one at a time.
• Next — scoped and intended; starts when a Now item finishes or when feedback pulls it forward.
• Later — direction, not a plan; may change shape entirely.
• Not planned — decided against, with the reason, so nobody waits for it.

To influence it: open or upvote an issue labelled roadmap, or join GitHub Discussions (opening with this roadmap). Meridian’s public beta is the live feedback source — what it teaches lands here in the next revision.

Where “done” goes: a shipped item moves into Recently shipped below in the same change that ships it. Fine-grained detail lives in the CHANGELOG’s [Unreleased] section as it happens, and in GitHub releases once tagged.

No dates, ever: a solo-maintained project cannot promise a delivery date without it becoming a promise the maintainer cannot keep. Status — what is being worked on now — is the honest unit of information this page can offer.

What will not change

1. The invariant. Every Affidavit field carries provenance, no exceptions; nothing commits without evidence, nothing writes without approval. Enforced by the ComplianceHarness — the conformance test suite every adapter must pass.
2. Field-level, not call-level. Approval of a whole tool call is commodity; Affiant’s unit is the field and its provenance chain.
3. The honest boundary. Affiant only swears to writes it can intercept in-process. It will not claim otherwise.
4. Library, not service. Affiant runs inside the adopter’s process. There is no hosted component, no licence server, and no phone-home.
5. Licensing of what is already published. Every version of every package published to nuget.org is Apache-2.0 and stays Apache-2.0 — that never changes retroactively. Any future change to how new versions are licensed would be announced here before it happened.
6. Statuses, not dates. This document never carries delivery dates.

Now

• Path to 1.0: stabilise the beta API [stability] — The next release is 1.0.0-beta.2; 1.0.0 follows once the list below is clear. What “stable” will mean is already defined in Versioning & compatibility. In flight: conversation-scope isolation when no ConversationId is supplied (all three adapters), SQLite/PostgreSQL store parity gaps, the review-outcome state machine (a card a reviewer refers to someone else can today land in a status no later step acts on), a test-isolation flake, and one removal already announced in the CHANGELOG — IDeterministicFieldSource, [Obsolete] today, removed no earlier than beta.2. Trust the invariant; expect the API to move until 1.0 — this is exactly what is moving. State: in progress. Links: affiant#41, affiant#33, affiant#34, affiant#37, affiant#17; issue: to be filed (referral outcome).
• A reusable Evidence Card: the <affiant-evidence-card> Web Component and @affiant/* npm packages [evidence-card-ui] — Today both first-party hosts render their own Evidence Card in React — two independent implementations — because the .NET packages ship no UI by design. Planned: a framework-agnostic Web Component (custom element, Shadow DOM) that renders a card straight from the wire contract, plus @affiant/contract (typed wire shapes) and a thin @affiant/react wrapper — the .NET packages still take no UI dependency; this is a separate, optional surface. State: designed, not built — no code exists yet. Links: issue: to be filed; Docket & Evidence Cards, Transport & Wire Contract.
• See a rendered Evidence Card in minutes: a minimal sample host and a quickstart that ends at the card [on-ramp] — Today the quickstart ends when the framework has filed the Affidavit and pushed the request onto the transport — correct, but invisible; seeing a rendered card today means wiring up a full host. Planned: one small sample (a single domain, one read tool, one write tool, SQLite, and the Web Component above or a plain page) runnable in a few minutes, a quickstart rewrite that ends at the rendered card, and the missing walkthrough of how a field gets its value. Meridian shows the end state; this shows the path. State: not started. Links: issue: to be filed; Quickstart, Try it live.
• Front door for contributors [community] — CONTRIBUTING.md, SECURITY.md (a disclosure path), CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md, issue templates, GitHub Discussions (opening with this roadmap), the roadmap label, and CI that runs cleanly for outside pull requests; the existing CHANGELOG discipline stays as is. The repo is public; the door should be too. State: not started; the file list is the scope. Links: issue: to be filed; open roadmap issues, Discussions.

Next

• Evidence Card amendments: correct a field before approving [review] — A reviewer can edit a proposed value on the card before approving; the correction is recorded with UserStated provenance, and the round-trip is part of the wire contract. Today amendments exist in the first-party host applications with gaps — free-text where a typed input would be safer, the control hidden while a card is submitting — and the framework-side round-trip is the deferred beta fast-follow. Links: issue: to be filed.
• A second live demo: HR Portal [demos] — An HR self-service host on the Microsoft.Extensions.AI adapter exists alongside Meridian. Standing it up as a second public demo — a second adapter, a second domain, the same guarantees — waits on what Meridian’s public beta teaches. Links: Try it live (Meridian).
• An Affiant MCP server [adapters] — Expose the Docket and the approve/reject decision as MCP (Model Context Protocol) tools, so agents that are not written in .NET can route their writes through the same review gate. Framed as exploring: cheap to try with the official C# MCP SDK, and whether anyone wants it is exactly what Discussions is for. This is the route to non-.NET agents; porting the framework itself is not (see Not planned). Links: issue: to be filed.
• Adapter parity and the Semantic Kernel host gap [adapters] — All three adapters — Semantic Kernel, Microsoft Agent Framework, Microsoft.Extensions.AI — are gated by the same ComplianceHarness parity suite, but no first-party host exercises the Semantic Kernel adapter live: Meridian runs on Agent Framework, HR Portal on Extensions.AI. A community reference host on Semantic Kernel is welcome (help wanted). Post-1.0, folding Affiant.AgentFramework onto Affiant.Extensions.AI so there is one interception surface is a decision pending, not scheduled. Links: affiant#39; Interception Backends, The Compliance Harness.

Later

• Evidence for auditors, part 1: crosswalks [auditors] — A possible set of informational mappings — not compliance claims — from Affiant’s records (Evidence Card, Docket, Affidavit, the retained decision log) to what named regimes ask a deployer to evidence: the NIST AI Risk Management Framework and its Generative AI Profile (NIST AI 600-1), both free text and voluntary; and EU AI Act Articles 14 (human oversight), 12 (record-keeping) and 26 (deployer obligations, including keeping logs for at least six months). Under Regulation (EU) 2026/1744 (in force 2026-07-27), the Annex III high-risk obligations apply from 2027-12-02 and Annex I from 2028-08-02 — stated here as external legal fact, not an Affiant delivery date. Wording throughout: “maps to” or “could evidence”, never “compliant with”. Links: issue: to be filed; NIST AI RMF, NIST AI 600-1, EU AI Act Article 14, Article 12, Article 26.
• Evidence for auditors, part 2: attestation export and retention [auditors] — A signed, portable export of a Docket’s Evidence Cards and Affidavits — a file an adopter hands to an auditor, not a hosted service — plus retention configuration so a deployer can meet a stated log-retention duty. ISO/IEC 42001 and SOC 2 mappings are on the table to evaluate; both attach to the adopting organisation’s management system or service audit, not to a library — Affiant will never claim to “be” certified. Links: issue: to be filed.
• Review policies: auto-approve rules, multi-step and multi-party review [review] — Today every card is a single human decision, though the model already declares the types for sequential review steps (ReviewStep) and for more than one approver (ReviewRequirement.MultiParty) with nothing implementing them yet. Direction: policy-driven auto-approval for low-risk writes, sequential steps, and more than one approver — semantics first, then code. Links: issue: to be filed.
• Synchronous (blocking) review mode [review] — A mode where the agent waits for the decision inside the tool call. The naive version deadlocks over a single SignalR connection (the real-time transport Affiant ships); the sound design needs a decision channel separate from the blocked connection, and no implementation is planned until the design settles. Links: affiant#29.
• Provenance integrity and what confidence measures [stability] — Harden source attribution so a field can never be attributed to the wrong tool, and define — then test — what an Affidavit’s AggregateConfidence measures. This sharpens the core claim (“sworn”); it is not a defect being fixed. Links: issue: to be filed.
• Provider failover in the framework, for all three adapters [stability] — Normative Rule 5 promises graceful degradation when a provider fails. Today the framework ships the configuration shape for a primary/secondary provider pair and a degraded-mode telemetry counter, for the Semantic Kernel adapter, and leaves the failover itself to the host application; the Agent Framework and Extensions.AI adapters have no equivalent. Direction: first-class failover executed inside the framework, the same on all three adapters. Links: issue: to be filed.
• Observability contract [stability] — Document the affiant.* OpenTelemetry attributes and activities as a stable, versioned contract. Links: issue: to be filed.
• dotnet new template [on-ramp] — A project template that scaffolds a wired host — DI, one read tool, one write tool, transport, card — once the sample host in Now has proven the shape. Links: issue: to be filed.

Not planned

• Intercepting hosted / provider-side tools — Tools the provider runs outside the host process (hosted MCP, code interpreter, web search) never enter the function-invocation pipeline, so no middleware fires and Affiant cannot swear to writes it never sees. This is a boundary, not a backlog item — see The Honest Boundary. Keep such writes read-only, or route them through a reviewed path.
• A LangChain (tryAGI) adapter — Researched: there is no pre-execution interception seam in that stack, and its maintainer recommends Microsoft.Extensions.AI or Semantic Kernel for .NET — both of which Affiant already supports. Would be revisited only if the stack gains a seam.
• A hosted Affiant service (SaaS console or evidence vault) — Affiant is a library that sits in an adopter’s write path; a hosted service in that path would need 24/7 operation the project cannot promise. The attestation export planned in Later covers the auditor need without a service.
• Porting the framework to Python or TypeScript — The reach to non-.NET agents is the MCP server planned in Next, not a second codebase.
• Relicensing existing versions — Every published version stays Apache-2.0 forever; see What will not change.

Recently shipped

• 2026-08-26 — Meridian public demo went live at meridian.affiant.dev. Try it live.
• 2026-08-23 — 1.0.0-beta.1: first public release, ten co-versioned packages, three adapters. Release, CHANGELOG.
• 2026-08-20 — Affiant.Extensions.AI: the Microsoft.Extensions.AI adapter joined the set. CHANGELOG.
• 2026-07-05 — Affiant.AgentFramework: the Microsoft Agent Framework adapter joined the package set. FAQ.

Themes

Each Now / Next / Later item carries a bracketed theme tag, so a reader can follow one thread through the sections:

[stability] [on-ramp] [evidence-card-ui] [adapters] [review] [auditors] [demos] [community]