The base period supports a six-month effort with a six-month option period. The plan is scoped for solo founder execution — all deliverables are designed for single-operator build, test, and documentation on local hardware. No team dependency, no cloud service dependency, no vendor lock-in.
Corpus assembly and source registry Months 1–2 Assemble public-safe operator reference corpus (public docs, open-source references, synthetic scenarios) Implement source registry with provenance, classification, and authorization fields Document ingestion pipeline with content addressing and metadata extraction Deliverable: corpus manifest with source registry schema Retrieval engine with bounded search Months 2–4 Implement hybrid retrieval (keyword + semantic) with document-count caps Source-registry-gated retrieval authorization Retrieval manifest generation with inclusion/exclusion rationale Deliverable: retrieval engine with evaluation harness Cited composer and uncertainty declaration Months 3–5 Implement cited-answer composition with mandatory source attribution Confidence taxonomy: grounded, single-source, thin, abstain Composer abstention gate — refuse to generate unsupported claims Deliverable: composer with abstention and citation verification Verifier, evaluator, and report output Months 4–6 Post-composition verification pass (claim-to-citation resolution) Structured report output format (query, sources, answer, uncertainty, receipt) Gold-set evaluation framework with reproducible metric runs Deliverable: end-to-end demo with evidence package Option period (Phase I Option, 6 months) Months 7–12 Hardened retrieval with additional source types and larger corpus Report-shape repair gate with automated recomposition Expanded gold-set evaluation across additional operator scenario types CycloneDX SBOM generation and security posture documentation Phase II transition package with architecture documentation and evaluation results Option items
Integration feasibility study with tactical data-link simulators Operator feedback collection protocol with domain experts Performance characterization under compute-constrained (edge) conditions Solo execution note
All milestones are designed for single-operator execution. The local-first architecture eliminates infrastructure dependencies that would require team coordination — no cloud provisioning, no DevOps pipeline management, no multi-service orchestration. The operator builds, tests, and documents on the same machine that runs the demo.