commandkit/docs/roadmap/future.md

Future work

Status: pending release and integration work, plus future capability proposals. No delivery dates are selected here.

Purpose and authority

Completed roadmaps, implementation plans, and review findings have been retired. This document preserves unfinished work and unselected ideas under the release policy. The completed ConfigKit adoption, reporting, dependency alignment, release-tooling, and remediation records remain available at the retirement snapshot. Earlier retired records also remain in Git history. Completed records are not assignments to restart work.

Accepted ADRs and the architecture policy govern any future implementation. The CLI reference, public GoDoc, and consumer guide own implemented behavior. Retaining an idea here does not select its syntax, API, priority, or delivery date.

Pending release and integration work

ckprompt release

The PromptKit v0.18.0 adoption roadmap records the completed migration and its unpublished ckprompt v0.3.0 candidate. Publication and hosted delivery remain separate operations under the release procedure. The published ckprompt v0.2.0 retains its earlier dependencies; see the consumer guide for module selection.

Later PromptKit release review

The current adoption develops only against PromptKit v0.18.0 as released. Review v0.19.0 separately once it is published; do not inspect or monitor unreleased upstream work in anticipation of that review. A later released version requires its own contract and compatibility assessment before selection and does not delay completion of the v0.18.0 adoption.

Future capability targets

Comparison extensions

Independent per-side domain selectors and an optional assertion mode remain unselected extensions to the delivered ConfigKit comparison. Consider them only for a concrete consumer need and a deliberate API/behavior decision under the relevant ADRs.

Configuration inspection extensions

The completed ConfigKit v1.1.0 adoption review retained the following work after dependency and source-report adoption. Metadata inspection is the recommended next functional sprint; the other features have no selected sequence or delivery date. These proposals do not establish command grammar, report schemas, or new provider requirements. ConfigKit's public APIs own the evidence and its semantics.

• Optional field metadata, path discovery, and history (OD-3). Expose native Metadata.Lookup, IsExplicit, HistoricalPaths, and History through an optional provider capability. Design field and history reports together, keeping existing providers usable. Distinguish effective paths from removed historical paths: a failed Lookup must not suppress available History. Validate that distinction and faithful projection of returned field/change records without recreating upstream provenance logic. Historical enumeration is not an exhaustive inventory of possible schema fields. This gives the earlier field-origin inventory proposal a concrete, upstream-backed scope; command names, selectors, and report shapes remain to be designed. For PromptKit, design this shared optional ckconfig capability first, then wire ConfigurationInspection.Metadata() through ckprompt.ConfigScope. This is PromptKit adoption OD-3; it does not require a separate provenance model or a new core API.
• Failed-load source inventory (OD-4). Present acquired source evidence from LoadError.Sources() while retaining the failed outcome and diagnostics. Design how an adapter returns its source facet on error and how result output precedes terminal failure presentation. Cover acquisition and report-delivery failures together; current diagnostic context remains available meanwhile.
• Detailed comparison (OD-5). Consider an additional form projecting native Difference paths, both snapshots, presence/redaction fields, and HiddenChanged. The current comparison retains the reduced additions/changes/deletions report. Decide later whether a detailed form complements it or replaces it through a deliberate compatibility change.
• Structured diagnostics (OD-6). Consider machine-readable native codes, paths, severities, and locations alongside CommandKit's shared reporting design. Define result/diagnostic channels, warning and terminal-failure interaction, and delivery outcomes. A ckconfig-specific report remains an alternative, with its cross-family alignment considered explicitly.
• Source-ID filtering. Consider selecting a record already available in the source inventory. Native Source(id) lookup is a convenience; this proposal need not introduce another command or require a lookup method from every custom source provider.

Discovery, import defaults, collection identities, and field-level resolution recording remain available through application loaders. Standard inspection of resource contexts or secrets-directory bootstrap has no immediate proposal; those capabilities primarily serve application loading and startup.

PromptKit inspection and selection extensions

The PromptKit adoption scope defers these capabilities beyond the v0.18.0 compatibility migration. Shared configuration metadata remains the recommended next functional sprint, under configuration inspection extensions. The OD identifiers below belong to the PromptKit adoption roadmap, separately from the ConfigKit review identifiers above.

• Prepared-request inspection (PromptKit OD-4). Consider an optional provider and report based on the released native Engine.Prepare and PreparedRun, reusing the concrete request-builder pattern. This would extend standard inspection into rendering and needs an explicit scope decision. The snapshot offers selected resource IDs, effective settings, output/schema metadata, messages, session ID, hashes, and timing without a model call. Its Messages contain complete rendered and appended messages; its effective execution settings exclude resolved API-key values. Select report content and document those upstream semantics rather than treating the complete snapshot as an existing inspection report. Command grammar, callback shape, formats, and the relationship to request validation remain open. Validate capability availability, forwarding, projection, and report delivery at CommandKit's boundary. PromptKit retains preparation and rendering semantics. Keeping this operation application-owned remains an alternative; model execution and prepared-handle lifecycle are outside this proposal.
• Namespace helpers or standard selectors (PromptKit OD-5). Begin with the adoption's consumer guidance for loaders returning Engine.WithNamespaces. Consider reusable bindings or helpers when consumers demonstrate repeated wiring. Design independent prompt/profile/backend defaults, applicable operations, and their interaction with existing catalog filters together. Namespace views resolve unqualified caller selections; they do not rewrite captured configuration references or global configuration inspection, and namespace/collection inventories remain global. Preserve the distinction between name resolution and catalog filtering. No flag names or changed filtering meanings are selected.
• Other reusable request bindings. Consider helpers for native request options only where consumers repeat wiring. Execution/output-validation overrides, session IDs, appended messages, and retry settings are already reachable through application request builders; engine options remain available through loaders. API availability alone does not select a standard flag or a new core abstraction.

The released prepared snapshot and namespace API provide the reviewed upstream contracts. These proposals establish no new provider requirement, delivery date, or adoption completion condition.

Alias completion and discovery

The delivered shell completion feature provides canonical suggestions and alias-aware interpretation. Potential future work includes suggesting command and flag alias spellings and valid continuations of alias-only prefixes. For example, completion could suggest inspect after app legacy when legacy inspect is an installed alias.

Alias discovery is outside the initial scope. This deferral does not establish a permanent canonical-only completion contract or prohibit future alias discovery. A later design should determine how alias suggestions are presented alongside canonical suggestions while ensuring inserted continuations form valid next steps. No delivery date or final API is selected here.

Reporting extensions

Error-conversion helpers such as WarnError remain deferred pending demonstrated value; applications can already use report.Warn(err.Error()). Terminal redraw and progress-bar presentation were outside the completed reporting scope and remain unselected. Whole-run buffering to make failed runs show only errors was also outside that scope. Any later extension needs a deliberate API and presentation decision rather than assuming those behaviors are already provided.

Release workflow extensions

Historical hosted-page backfilling and automated CI delivery remain separate future choices. The current local page-only delivery workflow is implemented; these extensions are not prerequisites for using it. The release procedure owns delivery, immutable content, and recovery behavior.

Additional validation options, including race testing, full vet, compilation matrices, size limits, and more forbidden-file paths, can be considered for demonstrated needs. None is selected by retaining it here, and the existing candidate checks do not become general prohibitions on development workspaces.

Other future proposals

These capabilities remain outside the delivered scope and require a concrete operator or consumer need and an appropriate ownership/behavior decision:

• JSON reports and output-file management or reloadable export.
• Shell completion extensions, including alias discovery described above and dynamic discovery of configured or remote values.
• Configuration mutation and generic value assignment. Field metadata and provenance inspection are scoped under configuration inspection extensions.
• Credential diagnostics beyond PromptKit's native smoke checks and additional live provider probes.
• Additional component identity registration and domain artifact catalogs.
• Additional library families, including possible FeedKit integration; families can define suitable verbs without requiring comparison or configuration scopes.
• Backend selection or replacement, a plugin framework, general dependency injection, and concurrent-dispatch guarantees.

Execution, rendering, serving, and session operations remain application-owned. The prepared-request inspection proposal would extend standard inspection into rendering and remains an open scope choice. Shared vocabulary is guidance under ADR 0006. Backend replacement remains possible behind the accepted facade, subject to the published API/CLI contracts and deliberate compatibility decisions.

Possible further efficiency work

Selected-scope memoization and selector-membership indexes were deferred pending measurements that justify their bookkeeping. Mutable backend reuse across invocations, segmented aggregate YAML delivery, provider caching, consumer-loader redesign, and a replacement backend were outside the completed performance target. Reconsider them only with concrete motivation and review of ownership, invocation state, native reports, and the affected contracts. Retained measurement records are historical evidence, not performance guarantees or release gates.

Consumer adoption

Consumer migrations remain separate from library delivery. Applications can replace duplicated standard handlers and routing, then update their CLI docs and subprocess consumers for intentional changes while retaining domain commands. No migration order or claim about individual applications' adoption is recorded here; the consumer guide and maintained examples provide integration guidance.