HELM Correction Register

Reviewed 2026-09-17. Owner: Firas Kafri. Status: all corrections below are open. This register records known issues; it does not implement new recommendations. See the evidence register for source inspection and claim-level limitations.

Compatibility policy

• 1.0.x: technical repairs, provenance, explicit evidence labels and publishing improvements that preserve the recommendation itself.
• Compatible minor release: additive guidance and clarifications that preserve existing practice and references.
• Breaking guidance change: removal or reversal of a requirement, changed authority or a materially different assessment interpretation. Assign an appropriate major version and migration guidance before publication. A breaking release does not imply company-wide expansion.

HELM 1.1 is the planning workstream for these issues, not advance approval that every correction is minor-compatible. Final version impact requires review of the actual replacement text. A citation or an evidence label is not validation of a recommendation.

C-01

Applicability and workflow redesign

• Canonical targets: Foundation principles 2 and 5; Practitioner anatomy/patterns; Leadership organizational model; role applicability.
• Issue: coding-agent delivery and runtime-agent product engineering are conflated; organizational redesign is generalized.
• Acceptance: explicit contexts, a usable one-workflow entry path, and conditional runtime infrastructure guidance.
• Evidence: enterprise commentary and provider guidance have differing contexts; see organizational model.
• Version impact: candidate minor for additive applicability guidance; removing mandatory reorganization language requires explicit compatibility review.

C-02

Autonomy versus operational maturity

• Canonical target: MATURITY_LEVELS in src/data/practitioners.ts and its practitioner narrative.
• Issue: autonomy progression is used as a team maturity scale without validation.
• Acceptance: independent dimensions, evidence requirements, and a mapping from existing Levels 1–5.
• Version impact: potentially breaking assessment interpretation; migration required before replacement.

C-03

Exact least-adopted-member rule

• Canonical targets: Foundation principle 6; Practitioner maturity reminder; Leadership maturity, engineering-manager authority and adoption equity; Engineering Manager role.
• Issue: a practitioner bottleneck example is promoted to an exact team-level formula.
• Acceptance: distinguish observed constraints from individual adoption; evaluate workflow bottlenecks using evidence.
• Version impact: replacement of an explicit rule is potentially breaking; preserve old references and explain interpretation changes.

C-04

Required responsibilities versus dedicated positions

• Canonical targets: Leadership authorities/scaling path; QA/Evaluation Lead boundary; role guides.
• Issue: dedicated positions, headcounts and the QA split are prescribed more broadly than their supporting sources.
• Acceptance: responsibilities stay accountable; staffing depends on workload, context and risk; reconcile eight role guides with nine authorities.
• Version impact: relaxing explicit requirements requires compatibility review and migration notes.

C-05

Single owner versus paired owners

• Canonical target: Leadership Decision Rights Matrix.
• Issue: several rows list paired owners under an explicit single-owner rule.
• Acceptance: identify one accountable decision owner, consulted specialists and required approvals for each row; test example decisions.
• Version impact: changes to authority may be breaking; record the owner/approval mapping.

C-06

Instructions, access controls and risk boundaries

• Canonical targets: Foundation accountability/guardrails; Practitioner tool types, Guardrail Stack, task matrix and human-agent boundary; incident guidance in role pages.
• Issue: written scope is not an enforced sandbox; read-only access is not inherently low-risk; CI success does not establish complete verification.
• Acceptance: distinguish intent from enforcement, cover least privilege and sensitive data, and distinguish read-only incident support from production changes.
• Version impact: additive safeguards may be minor; changes to allowed autonomy or required controls require compatibility review.

C-07

Categorical claims about work and universal success

• Canonical targets: Foundation introduction/principles; Practitioner anatomy and attribution priority; Roles introduction, universal competencies, role descriptions and hiring guidance.
• Issue: claims about all agents, past engineering work, most failures, obsolete skills and productivity multipliers exceed attached evidence.
• Acceptance: qualify prevalence and context, substantiate any numeric multiplier, and distinguish recommendation from description.
• Version impact: source qualifications can be patch-level; changing hiring or competency guidance requires a separately assigned version.

C-08

Statistics, quotations and causal explanations

• Canonical target: Foundation principles 2, 4, 5 and 6.
• Issue: 14% readiness is unverified; the cancellation forecast needs an inspectable primary source; quoted commentary is presented as a team case; secondary company examples imply unsupported causality.
• Acceptance: exact source passages, dates, population, method, and forecast/correlation/causation distinctions; remove unsupported numbers if they cannot be verified.
• Version impact: evidence labeling is included in 1.0.1. Fact corrections need explicit review; any resulting change in recommendations follows the semantic compatibility policy.

C-09

KPI direction and interpretation

• Canonical target: KPI_CATEGORIES and KPI_SUCCESS_FORMULA in src/data/leadership.ts.
• Issue: increasing test coverage or decreasing rejection rates is not inherently improvement. The formula and metric definitions are not validated performance instruments.
• Acceptance: define context, counter-metrics and evidence for interpretation; distinguish team delivery measures from individual assessment.
• Version impact: additive interpretation may be minor; changing metric definitions requires comparison/migration guidance.

Change history

• 2026-09-17: Registered known semantic issues separately from 1.0.x repairs and linked evidence limitations. No correction is marked implemented.