Portable capability contract — landed evidence

The complete contract now persists task requirements independently of provider identity and resolves concrete workers from runtime advertisements.

Task capability requirements flow into a deterministic matcher that selects from runtime-advertised workers. — Portable requirements remain in project state; model identity exists only at dispatch time.

Delivered

A versioned capability request with a neutral class and explicit reasoning, context, autonomy, verification, and risk floors.
Deterministic same-family and cross-family matching, one-below selection, and explicit escalation when no worker satisfies every hard requirement.
Read-time compatibility mapping for historical tier values with audit diagnostics and no automatic rewrite.
Round-trip support across semantic HTML, MCP operations, published JSON Schema, sprint items, followups, SPA labels, and skill prompts.

Verification

Gate	Result	Evidence
Matcher regressions	pass	19 focused tests cover exact matches, fallback ordering, absent workers, legacy input, and elevated-risk escalation.
Combined integration	pass	1,087 schema, reference, HTML, MCP, UI, and capability tests passed.
Full suite	pass	1,270 tests passed in 23.41 seconds.
Provider neutrality	pass	Current enums and defaults contain capability terms only; provider-family values remain compatibility inputs with warnings.
Git delivery	pass	Implementation commits `b1c9a5d` and `c1c6eeb` were integrated and pushed in `0b9339c`.

Integration note

An overlapping schema edit for qualified cross-project references reached the primary branch during integration. The merge retained the capability contract as authoritative while preserving the orthogonal reference grammar; the combined result passed the focused and full suites above.