Skip to content

Roadmap — Act 2: From Measured Prototype to Product (July 2026)

Act 1 (Phases 0–4 + Milestones 5–14, ROADMAP.md, STATUS.md) built and measured the trust substrate: one ingestion door, an explainable knowledge graph with reversible multi-field entity resolution, grounded answers with claim-level provenance, a CI-gated faithfulness floor, and an MCP surface carrying that contract across four measured boundaries (answer → action draft → payload preview → execution) — deterministic, offline, zero-account reproducible. The 2026-07-02 audit confirms it all runs as documented.

What Act 1 did not produce: a product. No UI, no way to point it at your own data, no users, and documentation drift from the autonomous run. Act 2 fixes that — without changing what makes the project rare (the determinism, the provenance contract, the measured floor).

Act 2 serves two concrete audiences on one build (evidence: MARKET.md):

  • Z Fellows (applicant in final selection: a one-month build period with weekly ship-updates, closing in a check-in presentation; the cohort week itself comes later). The maintainer has publicly committed, in writing, to shipping within the month: an open-source tool where every answer traces to its source, a live demo anyone can try, documented, with a push for first real external users and feedback. M17 (hosted demo) and M19 (launch + users) are that promise, scheduled.
  • SAP internship: the same system, told in SAP's own 2026 vocabulary and run on SAP primitives (HANA KG, SALT, BTP).

The thesis

The market gap is verified (MARKET.md §1): grounding vendors have no action layer, action/gateway vendors have no evidence layer, and both put an LLM inside the trust path. Nobody credibly offers per-claim provenance + evidence-gated actions with receipts + a self-shipped deterministic faithfulness benchmark + on-prem determinism. Tessera already implements that conjunction on demo data. Act 2's job is to make it usable, visible, and wanted.

Positioning (fixed, use everywhere):

The agent can only say what it can prove — and only do what you approve. Every claim carries provenance. Every action leaves a receipt. Faithfulness is a number in CI, not a vibe.

Rules: sell the receipt, not the philosophy; practitioner words (approval, audit trail, receipts, blast radius) over academic ones; never say "hallucination-free"; don't compete as an "MCP gateway" (permission layer, crowded) — Tessera is the evidence layer; LLMs may present (narration, ADR 0013) but never attest. For SAP specifically: SAP asserts trust at platform level; Tessera measures it at claim level — and gates action on it.

The build (four milestones + a parallel SAP track)

Discipline unchanged (CLAUDE.md): every unit spec → branch → gate → PR → CI-green → merge; ADRs for hard-to-reverse choices (UI stack, BYO-connector boundary, benchmark definition); pre-merge adversarial review for trust-bearing changes; /wrap every session — the audit showed what happens when that slips. Standing cadence on top: a short weekly ship-update to Z Fellows — each milestone close doubles as update material.

Milestone 16 — Close & clean (≈2–3 days)

Make the existing thing impeccable before adding anything. Input: AUDIT_2026-07-02.md.

  1. Drift repair (audit D1–D7): backfill STATUS for the 0104–0106 sessions (from PRs #115–#117), fix CHANGELOG [Unreleased], rewrite the WRITEUP idempotency limitation, fix the DEPLOYMENT embeddings contradiction, README count fix + link to this roadmap, reconcile the seven phantom spec numbers in specs/README.md (document, don't fabricate backdated specs), prune merged remote branches.
  2. Trust-path fixes (audit B1–B5, each spec'd + tested; B2/B4 carry adversarial review): recorder never clobbers a receipt (B1); idempotency pre-check gains a label-independent fallback + ADR 0026 addendum naming the residual (B2); token excluded from repr (B3); fence-injection neutralized
  3. marker-spoof residual documented (B4); {pr} segment allowlist (B5).
  4. Verifier honesty (audit B6–B7): ADR 0005 addendum naming over-citation and cross-boundary containment; score claims on refuse-kind cases. Metric definitions only change transparently, never to look better.
  5. Milestone 15 close: after unit 2, the maintainer runs the real one-shot (sandbox repo + PAT, runbook in DEPLOYMENT.md); commit the scrubbed receipt; WRITEUP/README/CHANGELOG; empty-diff audit; tag milestone-15. The four-boundary story ends with: it actually acted, once, on the record.

Done when: audit findings fixed or explicitly accepted in an ADR; tag milestone-15 exists; STATUS current; gate green.

Milestone 17 — Demoable to humans (≈1 week)

The audit's verdict: strong for an SAP engineer, weak for everyone else. Fix the presentation, not the trust model. The UI renders existing trust objects (GroundedResult, ActionProposal, RenderedPayload, ExecutionReceipt) — no new answer path, no new claims.

  1. Answer presentation: optional narration (ADR 0013 adapters, Anthropic key) on the chat/demo surface so answers read as prose above the canonical claims — the verifier and eval stay untouched; label narrated text as such. Fix cosmetics: :trust float formatting, MCP serverInfo version, chunk rendering.
  2. Web UI (new ui extra; stack choice is an ADR): one page — ask → claims with per-claim verifier chips → click-through provenance (records, locators, resolution trail with confidences) → trust panel (history) → the action flow: draft → payload preview → approve → receipt. Local-first; a read-only hosted mode flag.
  3. Hosted demo + assets: deploy the read-only UI on synthetic data (small VM/PaaS, no keys); record the 2–3-minute video; one-pager (EN/DE). The video's arc is the Replit-incident counter-story: question → grounded answer → provenance walk → refusal → drafted action → dry-run → approval → receipt.
  4. The "agent through Tessera" demo: a scripted session where a real LLM agent (Claude over MCP) answers only through Tessera's tools — the audience watches it cite, refuse, and get its action gated. This is the Z Fellows demo and the SAP demo in one.

Done when: a stranger can watch the video or click the hosted demo and understand the product in under 3 minutes; the cohort presentation can run live offline.

Milestone 18 — Usable on your data (≈1 week)

The wedge from demo to product; the pilot vehicle for design partners. Reuses the existing ingestion/connector patterns — engine untouched.

  1. tessera connect github <owner/repo>: generalize the GitHub Actions connector (snapshot fetch → graph) to any repository (read-only PAT). Grounded RCA over their failures; optionally the gated create-issue flow on their repo. An honest eval note: expectations for foreign data are thin at first — say so; a per-repo smoke battery (runs parse, provenance resolves, refusals fire) is the floor.
  2. tessera ingest <dir>: CSVs + Markdown/text with declared match-field config (what sources/salt.py + documents.py do, made generic). Cross-source questions on their data with the same provenance contract.
  3. Pilot runbook ("pilot in a day"): the consultancy offer — we instrument one agent use case with provenance + action receipts; you keep the audit artifact. Quickstart such that a stranger reaches a grounded answer on their own repo in <30 minutes.

Done when: Tessera answers with full provenance on ≥2 external repositories (at least one not ours) and on one foreign CSV+docs corpus; the BYO paths have their own boundary tests.

Milestone 19 — Launch & traction (≈1 week, overlaps M18)

Playbook and targets: MARKET.md §5. Everything public goes out under the maintainer's identity — his call on timing.

  1. Be findable: MCP registry, PulseMCP, mcp.so, awesome-mcp-servers PR.
  2. The benchmark artifact: "The Faithfulness Floor" — same corpus, naive agent vs. evidence-gated Tessera; deterministic, reproducible, no LLM judge; published in-repo + as a post. (The credibility substrate; also the Z Fellows one-axis-outlier proof.)
  3. Launch: Show HN ("open-source evidence gate for AI agents — claim provenance, approval-gated actions, execution receipts") + r/LLMDevs + X thread. After M17's hosted demo exists.
  4. Outreach wave: 100–150 personalized DE/EN messages to the named DACH consultancy/partner list, 3–4 touches, offering the M18 pilot. Target: ≥5 calls, ≥2 design-partner pilots with a written 2-week success definition. Opportunistic: AI Tinkerers Berlin/Munich demo slot; DSAG Jahreskongress (Oct 6–8) and data2day CfPs.
  5. Z Fellows kit: the check-in presentation — problem (Replit story) → live demo → what shipped in 30 days (velocity, receipts) → 3/6/12-month plan → asks (design-partner intros, enterprise-AI mentors). The same 5-minute arc serves the later in-cohort presentation.

Done when: launched, benchmark published, outreach sent, ≥2 pilots agreed (or the honest miss recorded), presentation rehearsed.

SAP track (parallel, before/around the application)

Ranked by credibility-per-effort (MARKET.md §7):

  • S1 — SALT real-data evaluation: request gated HF access now (lead time); the schema-synthetic swap-in was designed for this since Phase 1. Run ER + grounding + eval on real SALT; engage SALT-KG (arXiv 2601.07638) — its "models can't leverage relational semantics" finding is Tessera's thesis, from SAP's own researchers.
  • S2 — HANA Knowledge Graph persistence: persist the graph to HANA Cloud's GA KG engine (RDF/SPARQL) — "runs on SAP Knowledge Graph", beside the existing recorded VECTOR_EMBEDDING closes.
  • S3 — BTP/AI Core serving: execute the written runbook (spend decision) — turns "designed for BTP" into "ran on BTP".
  • S4 — Application kit: README/one-pager mapping to Sapphire-2026 language ("relevant, reliable, responsible"; Agent Hub "verification badges" ↔ a measured faithfulness score; receipts ↔ auditability), the DSAG 3% hook; apply to both iXp and working-student tracks; target BTP AI Core / GenAI Hub (Walldorf/Berlin), Joule Studio, Business AI research, Prior Labs as the long shot.

Maintainer decisions & accounts checklist

Only these need the maintainer (everything else proceeds autonomously per CLAUDE.md):

  1. Run the M15 one-shot (after M16 unit 2): sandbox repo + fine-grained PAT + TESSERA_EXEC_* in .env (~15 min). Credentialed and irreversible — deliberately yours.
  2. HANA instance health: verify the M6/M7 instance still exists (trial instances expire/auto-stop) before any live cloud demo; re-provision or demo offline otherwise.
  3. SALT access: request via Hugging Face (personal account) — today; approval lead time is the risk.
  4. Anthropic API key for narration + the M17 agent demo (small spend).
  5. Hosting for the read-only demo (~€0–20/month) and optionally a domain.
  6. BTP trial/free tier account for S2/S3.
  7. Z Fellows logistics: confirm the check-in date (and, if accepted, the later cohort week / SF-NYC attendance) — the month plans backwards from the check-in.
  8. Launch consent: Show HN / X / outreach go out under your name and timing.

What Act 2 will NOT do

  • No LLM in the trust path (narration presents; the verifier attests) — this is the differentiator.
  • No MCP-gateway feature race (auth, rate limits, policy engines).
  • No third connector before the two BYO paths work end-to-end.
  • No multi-tenant SaaS, no auth/RBAC theater — pilots run on-prem/local, which the on-prem story makes a feature.
  • No rename; no "hallucination-free" claims; no weakening or gaming the eval — a number that can't fail is decorative (Milestone 5's lesson).
  • No paid ads, no spam; 150 personalized messages beat 1,500 generic ones.

Success criteria (end of Act 2, ≈ 2026-08-02)

  1. milestone-15 tagged; the real receipt committed; audit findings closed or ADR-accepted; STATUS current at every wrap from here on.
  2. Hosted demo + video live; the live demo runs offline end-to-end.
  3. BYO works: grounded, provenance-complete answers on ≥2 external repos + 1 foreign CSV/docs corpus, with boundary tests.
  4. Launched (Show HN + registries) and the benchmark report published.
  5. ≥150 outreach touches → ≥5 calls → ≥2 design-partner pilots (or the miss honestly recorded with what was learned).
  6. Z Fellows presentation delivered; SALT access requested and S1 started; S4 application kit ready.

Risks

  • Solo bandwidth — the plan over-fills 4 weeks by design; the cut order is fixed: M18.2 (ingest dir) → M19.2 (benchmark) → S2/S3 slip. M16, M17.2–3, M18.1, M19.3–5 are the spine and don't slip.
  • Launch flops — design partners come from outreach, not HN; the wedge survives a quiet launch.
  • HANA/SALT access delays — offline demo remains the default; synthetic- on-real-schema remains the honest fallback and is documented as such.
  • UI scope creep — the UI renders existing trust objects only; any feature that would need a new answer path is out.
  • Check-in date unknown — decision #7 above; until known, M16→M17 order is robust either way.