Roadmap

AEP Roadmap

Phase 0: Vision And Design ✅ Complete

Goal: define the project direction clearly enough for external review.

Deliverables (all delivered):

Vision document
Architecture document
Protocol design draft
MCP relationship document
Initial terminology

Phase 1: Core Specification Draft ✅ Complete

Goal: produce a minimal implementable protocol specification.

Deliverables (all delivered):

Event envelope JSON Schema (schemas/aep-envelope.schema.json)
Standard event type registry (reference/typescript/src/event-types.js)
Session and capability negotiation spec (docs/specs/session.md)
Subscription spec (docs/specs/subscription.md)
Task lifecycle spec (docs/specs/task-lifecycle.md)
Error model (docs/specs/error-model.md)
Versioning rules (docs/specs/versioning.md)
Shared conformance fixtures for reference implementations (conformance/fixtures/)

Phase 2: Transport Bindings ✅ Complete

Goal: define how AEP runs over common transports.

Initial bindings:

stdio for local process integration (docs/specs/transport-stdio.md, implemented in reference/typescript/src/transport/stdio.js)
WebSocket for bidirectional streams (docs/specs/transport-websocket.md, implemented in reference/typescript/src/transport/websocket.js)
HTTP SSE for server-to-client event streams (docs/specs/transport-sse.md, implemented in reference/typescript/src/transport/sse.js)

Later bindings:

gRPC streaming (docs/specs/transport-grpc.md, implemented in reference/typescript/src/transport/grpc.js)
NATS (docs/specs/transport-nats.md, implemented in reference/go/aep/transport_nats.go)
Kafka
Redis Streams

Phase 3: Reference Implementation ✅ Complete

Goal: prove the spec with a small, understandable implementation.

Deliverables (all delivered across four languages):

TypeScript reference server and client
Python reference client
JSON Schema validation
Simple local router
Example async tool (reference/typescript/examples/async-tool-producer.js)
Example memory event producer (reference/typescript/examples/memory-event-producer.js)
Example agent subscriber (reference/typescript/examples/agent-subscriber.js)
Cross-language conformance tests using shared fixtures

Phase 4: MCP Bridge ✅ Complete

Goal: demonstrate clean interop with MCP.

Deliverables (all delivered):

MCP tool call to AEP task bridge (reference/typescript/src/bridge/mcp-bridge.js)
AEP task completion events from MCP tools
Example MCP server emitting AEP events (reference/typescript/examples/mcp-bridge/demo.js)
Example agent consuming both MCP and AEP (reference/typescript/examples/mcp-aep-consumer.js)

Phase 5: Reliability And Production Semantics ✅ Complete

Goal: support durable and distributed deployments.

Deliverables (all delivered):

Replay cursors (docs/specs/delivery.md)
Acknowledgement protocol (docs/specs/delivery.md)
Dead-letter events (docs/specs/reliability.md, reference/typescript/src/delivery.js)
Retry policy metadata (docs/specs/reliability.md, reference/typescript/src/delivery.js)
Authorization model (docs/specs/security.md)
Multi-tenant routing model (docs/specs/security.md)

Phase 6: Ecosystem And Governance ✅ Complete

Goal: make AEP usable as a general open protocol.

Deliverables (all delivered):

Public specification site (docs/site/, generated by tools/generate-spec-site.js)
Compatibility test suite (tools/conformance-runner.js)
Conformance levels (docs/specs/conformance.md, conformance/manifest.json)
Event registry governance (docs/specs/event-registry-governance.md)
Contribution guide (CONTRIBUTING.md)
Code of conduct (CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md)
Security considerations (docs/specs/security.md)

Suggested First Milestone ✅ Achieved

The first milestone AEP 0.1 Draft has been delivered:

One event envelope ✅
One subscription model ✅
One async task lifecycle ✅
One context event family ✅
One memory event family ✅
Two transport bindings: stdio and WebSocket ✅
One MCP bridge example ✅

AEP has since expanded to include four transport bindings (stdio, WebSocket, SSE, gRPC), full delivery and reliability subsystems, SQLite-backed stores, four language references, cross-language conformance testing, and a published spec site.

Phase 7: Agent Semantics And Positioning ✅ Complete

Goal: distinguish AEP from existing event systems and define agent-runtime metadata.

Deliverables (all delivered):

Differentiation and positioning document (docs/differentiation.md)
Agent-runtime-semantics specification (docs/specs/agent-runtime-semantics.md)
Extended event envelope schema with 15 optional agent-runtime metadata fields (schemas/aep-envelope.schema.json)
Six new standard event families: belief, freshness, delegation, interruption, compensation, provenance
All 4 language event registries updated with 18 new event types
Cross-language conformance fixture for agent-runtime semantics (4/4 languages PASS)

Phase 8: Delivery End-to-End Conformance ✅ Complete

Goal: exercise real DeliveryTracker trace (track → ack, track → nack, track → dead-letter) in every language's conformance harness.

Deliverables (all delivered):

AEP-C3 conformance level with delivery_e2e expectation
conformance/fixtures/delivery-e2e.ndjson — full tracking lifecycle fixture
DeliveryTracker integration in all 4 language harnesses
Cross-language delivery-e2e fixture PASS at AEP-C3 default target
Payload schema validation for 26 event types in TypeScript and Python (schemas/aep-payloads.schema.json)

Current Completion State

All eight roadmap phases (Phase 0 through Phase 8) are fully delivered. The protocol covers 17 specifications, 4 conformance levels (C0–C3), 7 cross-language fixtures, 4 transport bindings, ~370 tests across four languages, and a published spec site at https://axisrobo.github.io/aep/. Default conformance target is AEP-C3 with DeliveryTracker integration in all languages.

Future roadmap work should focus on: additional transport bindings (Kafka, Redis Streams), production delivery-store backends, formal protocol versioning, and community governance structures.