feat: define repository continuity contract

[szmyty]

Closes #79.

Outcome

Defines the provider-neutral aether.repository-continuity/v1 contract and the focused maintain-repository-continuity skill so a fresh repository session can resume from a concise, evidence-grounded root CONTINUITY.md without replaying a prior conversation.

What changed

• adds the versioned specification and Draft 2020-12 metadata schema;
• fixes the canonical path at exact-case root CONTINUITY.md;
• defines immutable base, candidate, and time-bounded live state separately without a self-referential commit requirement;
• defines stale/superseded state, parallel-PR reconciliation, transition-safe pre/post-merge wording, privacy exclusions, and fixed 16 KiB / 240-line limits;
• adds a canonical Markdown template with twelve ordered operational sections;
• adds the focused maintenance skill with resume, create, reconcile, refresh, compact, verify, and pre-PR handoff flows;
• adds authoring, privacy/trust, and validation guidance;
• evaluates the Antidote prototype and the merged private Comics canary, including what to retain, change, or reject;
• adds 13 deterministic skill eval cases covering new/detailed repositories, stale and merged PR state, conflicts, parallel branches, missing live access, private repositories, malicious text, truncation, and tampering;
• adds schema fixtures and 11 focused contract tests;
• regenerates the first-party catalog and deterministic skill/spec distributions;
• names Aether Integrate continuity handoffs across repository-mutating skills and agent projections #80, Hygiene feat(projections): add provider-neutral agent adapters #45, EgoLint feat: establish governed social-surface catalog skill #55, Holon Define the architecture materialization contract #42, Relay feat: curate external AI artifact sources #60, Observatory chore(staging): complete the Aether staging evacuation and milestone audit #18, and Pace test(evals): add executable skill evaluation harness #26 as downstream integration owners.

Boundaries

This PR does not perform the cross-skill/agent wiring in #80, make CONTINUITY.md an organization-wide required file, implement the EgoLint conformer, add mutating hooks, or roll the contract out to consumer repositories. It grants no merge, publication, deployment, credential, or external-write authority.

Validation

Passed:

• ./aether distribution build --output-directory "dist" --check
• ./aether validate --format "text" (existing preserved-provenance warning only)
• ./aether catalog generate --check
• python3 "catalog/validate_catalog.py"
• ./aether eval run --skill "maintain-repository-continuity" --mode "deterministic" --format "text" — 13/13 cases
• python3 -m unittest "tests.test_repository_continuity_contract" — 11/11 tests
• python3 "library/organization/skills/validate-skills.py" — all 34 skills
• git diff --check

Environment limitation:

• ./aether test ran 154 tests: 153 passed and the existing consumer-installation E2E errored before its scenarios because this workspace has no local gh executable.
• gh skill publish "dist" --dry-run was therefore not available locally; PR CI owns that check in its GitHub CLI-equipped runner.

Coordination

Open PR #75 was created from the same base and also touches README.md inventory counts and the generated first-party catalog. Whichever PR lands second must update from main, regenerate the catalog/distributions, and rerun validation; no semantic contract overlap was found.

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