Field note

Field note #33 — F-WF-05 incident management lands its SKELETON wave: a canonical CACAO source on the content side and worked-example skeletons across n8n, Temporal, and LangGraph, each guarded by a drift contract under CI

  • shipping-update
  • f-wf-05
  • incident-management
  • skeleton
  • cacao
  • content-model
  • drift-guard
  • source-shape-guard
  • compilers
  • temporal
  • langgraph
  • n8n
  • digital-commons

Field note #32 read F-WF-03 alert triage flipping to Shipped on the roadmap with the worked example end to end on every reference target, three independent CI contracts on top, and a cookbook walkthrough beside it. F-WF-05 incident management had been kicked off the wave before — its ROADMAP entry moved from Proposed to In Progress, and the gap inventory opened against main.

This note reads off F-WF-05’s first composition wave: the SKELETON wave. A canonical CACAO source for incident management is now under content, three worked-example skeletons on n8n, Temporal, and LangGraph render against it, and each one is guarded by a drift contract under CI. F-WF-05 joins the substrate as the fourth workflow with full three-target SKELETON parity.

What this note reads off main

F-WF-05 CORE-SKEL-SRC: canonical CACAO source + source-shape guard

The first move binds the content side. Through PR #251, a canonical CACAO playbook for incident management lands under content/playbooks/incident_management/ as the single source the three compile targets read against, and a source-shape guard goes under CI: the canonical source has to validate against the CACAO schema the project has been carrying, and any step the playbook names has to declare the shape downstream compilers will look for.

The regulatory anchor F-WF-05 names is NIS2 Article 23 — the notification obligations on a significant incident, the timeline the workflow has to walk from awareness through early warning, incident notification, and final report. The canonical source reads that arc as a CACAO playbook: triggers, intake, classification against the significance threshold, the notification branches that fan out by recipient (CSIRT, regulator, affected community), the post-incident beats, and the audit-mirror sibling every workflow on the substrate shares.

F-WF-05 CORE-SKEL-N8N: SKELETON n8n worked example + drift guard

The n8n SKELETON lands through PR #252: a worked example on the n8n reference compile target that renders the F-WF-05 canonical source into the n8n workflow shape, with the step graph, the typed payload shapes, and the audit-mirror sibling all in place but the per-step bodies left as the SKELETON markers the CORE-WIRE wave fills in beat by beat. A drift guard sits under CI: the rendered worked example has to keep reading against the canonical source’s step list and shape, and any new step or shape change on the content side fails the build until the worked example is regenerated.

F-WF-05 CORE-SKEL-LG: SKELETON LangGraph worked example + drift guard

The LangGraph SKELETON lands through PR #253: the same arc rendered into LangGraph’s graph-of-nodes shape, against the same canonical CACAO source, with the same SKELETON markers and the same drift guard under CI. The shape that emerges is the shape the previous three workflow SKELETONs already established: the three compile targets read the same content artefact and render it into the three target-native shapes, and the drift guard makes the three renders stay in sync as the source moves.

F-WF-05 CORE-SKEL-TMP: SKELETON Temporal worked example + drift guard

The Temporal SKELETON lands through PR #254: the same arc rendered into Temporal’s workflow-and-activities shape, against the same canonical CACAO source, with the same SKELETON markers and the same drift guard under CI. With this PR the three-target parity on F-WF-05 reads true: a single canonical source on the content side, three worked-example skeletons on the compile side, and four CI contracts on top — the source-shape guard plus a drift guard on each target.

What this wave closes

It closes F-WF-05 into the SKELETON shape every other workflow on the substrate has already taken: a canonical CACAO source under content with a source-shape guard, a worked-example skeleton on each of the three reference compile targets, and a drift guard under CI on each render. F-WF-05 is the fourth workflow to read this shape, alongside F-WF-01 vuln intake, F-WF-03 alert triage, and the other SKELETON-complete workflows on the substrate.

It closes the structural half of the F-WF-05 composition: the canonical source names every step the incident-management workflow will touch, the three renders bind those steps into target-native shapes, and the drift guards make the SKELETON wave’s promise — that the three renders read against the same content — a CI contract rather than a wiring property held by hand.

It closes the gap between F-WF-05 being In Progress on the roadmap and F-WF-05 having a runnable skeleton on main that a contributor can clone and inspect on whichever of the three reference targets they already run, even before the CORE-WIRE wave binds the per-step bodies.

What this wave does not promise

It does not promise the per-step bodies are wired. SKELETON is deliberately the shape that lets CORE-WIRE land step by step on top. The action bodies the incident-management playbook names — the significance classification, the notification fan-out, the post-incident composition — sit as SKELETON markers on each of the three worked examples and read into the next composition waves as the CORE-WIRE work picks them up beat by beat.

It does not promise the EXTEND-tests trio under CI yet. The same-target determinism contract, the cross-target byte-parity golden replay, and the dedup or notification-collision contract each read into their own composition moves once the CORE-WIRE wave has bodies for them to run against. The drift guards on each SKELETON render are the contracts this wave puts under CI; the shipped trio of CI contracts lands as F-WF-05 walks the same EXTEND-tests arc F-WF-01 and F-WF-03 have already walked.

It does not promise the F-WF-05 cookbook page in this wave. The operator-facing cookbook walkthrough lands as the EXTEND-docs beat once the CORE-WIRE bodies and the EXTEND-tests trio are on main, the same shape the two shipped workflows already established.

Community lane status

The community-ignition entry point — “Open for contributors” — remains live against five good-first-issues on secops-ng-framework, and the free practitioner Discord (discord.gg/secops-ng) remains the contributor chat. A contributor walking in today finds the same five issues open, two complete worked examples reading end to end against three reference targets (F-WF-01 vuln intake, F-WF-03 alert triage), and now four workflow SKELETONs with three-target parity on the substrate — the fourth, F-WF-05 incident management, just landed and is ready for CORE-WIRE contributions on each of its action bodies on each of the three reference targets.

Where the work is

Walk the framework repo today and F-WF-05 incident management reads as a canonical CACAO source under content with a source-shape guard, three worked-example skeletons on n8n, Temporal, and LangGraph each guarded by a drift contract under CI, and the NIS2 Article 23 notification arc named end to end on the source even before the per-step bodies bind. The next moves walk the CORE-WIRE wave across the action bodies the playbook names, step by step on each of the three reference compile targets, against the same composition shape the two shipped workflows already established.

More from the lanes as CORE-WIRE picks up the incident-management action bodies and the SKELETON-complete substrate keeps walking the launch-window workflow set onto runnable worked examples beat by beat.

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