How I decide if a system is ready: PRISM
PRISM is the method I run on your repository. It doesn’t scan and it doesn’t score. It answers one question:
Is this system, in this frozen commit and this environment, ready for this specific milestone, given the assumptions we wrote down together?
- 1
Scope. We fix the milestone, the exact commit, the environment, the critical flows and the exclusions in writing, before I touch the code.
- 2
Invariants. From that scope I write down what must always be true, in plain sentences. For example:
“a tenant only reads its own invoices.”
- 3
Tests, both ways. Each invariant gets a positive control, which checks that it works when it should, and a negative control, which checks that it refuses when it shouldn’t. One direction alone proves little.
- 4
Evidence. Every result is recorded with an ID, the commit, the command that was run, the result and a hash. A summary written by a language model never counts as evidence.
- 5
Verdict. I give one of four verdicts, listed below.
- READY
- CONDITIONALLY READY
- NOT READY
- INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE
- Maturity scores, 1 to 5, are recorded per area. They are never averaged into the verdict.
- Missing evidence never becomes an approval. If I couldn’t test something, the verdict says so.
- I decide the severity of each finding and the final verdict. A model never certifies its own work.
- PRISM makes no compliance, certification or absolute-security claims.