What is scored
The strongest credible publicly demonstrated maturity for a declared job and population. Not average product quality, hidden private capability, or the median practitioner experience.
How to read and update this
The scorecard is a versioned judgment surface, not a psychometric instrument.
Its job is to make the definition of progress, current distance, uncertainty, and evidence required to move explicit.
How history is scored
The August 2026 rubric is applied to evidence available at each milestone. Unlike benchmark percentages are not normalized; evidence published before a freeze but captured later is disclosed as an omission, not awarded as a later gain.
What a plateau means
An ordinal score moves only across a threshold. Large gains inside a level or a new harder distribution belong in the supporting evidence, not invented decimal precision.
What should move it
Preserve the task, population, environment, model, harness, tools, acceptance evidence, non-transfer contexts, and prior dated scorecard whenever a score changes.
Most valuable missing evidence
A linked set of complete episodes: purpose and audience, authoritative data, accepted artifact, delivered interaction, representative human outcome, total effort, later correction, and ownership transfer.
Absence of a complete episode is why outcome and lifecycle maturity remain at level 1 even while component benchmarks improve.