Patent Workaround

Adversarial patent workaround testing

Run a version-locked competitor/drafter loop. Keep the main agent in the strategic patent-drafter role and use a fresh subagent as the competitor/product architect for each challenge cycle. The goal is not maximal claim breadth. The goal is supported, patentable coverage of commercially material alternatives that genuinely belong to the invention, with deliberate visibility into what remains outside the claims.

Never describe a result as proof of infringement, noninfringement, validity, enforceability, patentability, or freedom to operate. Recommend review by qualified patent counsel before filing or relying on any amendment.

Read before acting

Read all of these files completely:

• references/workaround-protocol.md for the adversary's role and output contract.
• references/integration-gates.md for umbrella classification and amendment gates.
• references/current-sources.md for the current-law and prior-art source hierarchy.

Copy and complete assets/workaround-intake.yaml, assets/invention-thesis.md, assets/search-record.md, and assets/evidence-manifest.json. Use assets/adversary-handoff.md and a completed assets/adversary-brief.md for every fresh subagent, maintain assets/coverage-ledger.md throughout the run, and copy assets/outer-adjudication.md for every outer-agent disposition.

If the sibling ../patent-audit skill is installed, read its SKILL.md and use its parser and deterministic pre-pass to obtain the claim dependency graph, element decomposition, section inventory, and mechanical findings. If ../patent-examine is installed, use its current-law, prior-art, and prosecution-risk discipline when testing a proposed claim package. A prior audit or examination does not substitute for this workaround loop.

Non-negotiable distinctions

Maintain all of these distinctions in every report:

1. Claim coverage asks whether every limitation of at least one relevant claim is met. It is a legal-scope hypothesis, not an umbrella judgment.
2. Workaround credibility asks whether the alternative can plausibly deliver materially the same user or commercial value. A toy omission that destroys the value is not a meaningful workaround.
3. Umbrella alignment asks whether the credible alternative belongs in the intended patent-family or filing thesis in view of the motivating problem, design objectives, deployed solution, commercial substitution, and user-defined scope. It is strategic: an alternative may be umbrella-aligned even when the current application does not support it. It does not expand the legal scope of the claims.
4. Disclosure support asks what the authoritative application actually teaches or reasonably conveys. Business intent, a broad value proposition, or a newly imagined alternative is not automatically written-description support.
5. Patentability asks whether a proposed capture strategy survives current-law and prior-art scrutiny. A workaround can expose a real commercial gap that cannot safely be claimed.

Do not say a workaround is "covered by the patent" merely because it falls under the invention's theme. Narrative language can support construction or future claims, but exclusionary scope comes from claims and applicable law.

State and evidence model

Create a dedicated run directory and preserve the user's original files. Maintain:

1. Ground truth: the authoritative editable application, frozen during a cycle.
2. Challenge candidate: a complete clean application with the exact proposed claims and disclosure for the next adversary.
3. Frozen challenge packet: the candidate plus every decision-controlling input, including intake, invention-thesis map, prosecution history, deployed-product facts, search record, and an evidence manifest containing hashes for raw evidence.
4. Challenge record: adversary reports, claim charts, support maps, prior-art search records, coverage ledger, redlines, decisions, version hashes, and unresolved risks.

Use scripts/coverage_state.py to lock challenge packets and independent decisions. A fresh decision applies only to the explicit version and packet hash it reviewed. Any material change to the application, invention thesis, prosecution record, deployed-product facts, search evidence, or other decision input requires a new packet version and resets qualifying challenge decisions.

python scripts/coverage_state.py init --run-dir workaround_run `
  --candidate application=application.docx --candidate drawings=drawings.pdf `
  --candidate intake=intake.yaml --candidate thesis=invention-thesis.md `
  --candidate search=search-record.md --candidate evidence=evidence-bundle.zip `
  --authoritative application --authoritative drawings

python scripts/coverage_state.py snapshot --run-dir workaround_run `
  --candidate application=proposal/application.docx `
  --candidate drawings=proposal/drawings.pdf --candidate intake=intake.yaml `
  --candidate thesis=invention-thesis.md --candidate search=search-record.md `
  --candidate evidence=evidence-bundle.zip

$packetHash = "<copy packet_sha256 from snapshot output>"

python scripts/coverage_state.py record --run-dir workaround_run `
  --version v002 --packet-sha256 $packetHash --adversary competitor-01 `
  --stage raw --decision gaps-found `
  --document workaround_run/competitor-01/report.md

python scripts/coverage_state.py record --run-dir workaround_run `
  --version v002 --packet-sha256 $packetHash --adversary competitor-01 `
  --stage adjudication --decision only-accepted-gaps `
  --document workaround_run/competitor-01/adjudication.md `
  --ledger workaround_run/coverage-ledger.md

# Repeat with a second fresh adversary. After two qualifying dispositions, apply the
# proposal verbatim and verify the complete challenged packet:
python scripts/coverage_state.py promote --run-dir workaround_run `
  --version v002 --candidate application=application.docx `
  --candidate drawings=drawings.pdf --candidate intake=intake.yaml `
  --candidate thesis=invention-thesis.md --candidate search=search-record.md `
  --candidate evidence=evidence-bundle.zip

python scripts/coverage_state.py status --run-dir workaround_run

Use stable labels for all packet components. application, intake, thesis, search, and evidence are required; drawings is optional at initialization but cannot later be silently added or omitted. Every label passed with --authoritative is an authoritative editable destination. Mark application and every separately supplied specification, claims, abstract, drawing, sequence, or appendix source as authoritative. Promotion succeeds only after the accepted bytes have been applied to all of those exact paths. Later status checks fail if a promoted authoritative file drifts from the promoted packet.

Run coverage_state.py commands serially from one outer agent. The state writer is not a multi-process transaction service; do not issue parallel record or snapshot commands.

Use the relevant document and PDF skills to preserve source formatting, claim numbering, dependencies, tracked changes, equations, and drawings. Never edit an extraction and present it as the authoritative source.

Phase 0 - Intake and completeness gate

Obtain or locate:

• the complete specification, claims, abstract, drawings, appendices, and editable source;
• application status, filing and priority facts, public-disclosure facts, and the complete prosecution history if filed;
• the intended value proposition, target users, motivating problem, design objectives and constraints, asserted inventive mechanisms, and indispensable commercial coverage;
• the actual deployed or prototyped solution, including actors, boundaries, data or material flow, control locus, timing, optional features, and known substitutes;
• closest prior art, search logs, related patents/applications, cited references, known competitor approaches, and relevant technical evidence;
• inventor-confirmed alternatives and generalizations already contemplated.

Do not infer missing inventor facts. Mark them missing and distinguish cannot assess from no gap found. If readable claims or enough disclosure to construe them is missing, return INCOMPLETE rather than inventing a workaround test.

Before sending confidential unpublished details to public search services, explain the exposure and obtain authorization. Search public abstractions or local materials when that can answer the question without disclosing confidential subject matter.

Phase 1 - Build the invention-thesis map

Build an evidence-cited map with separate rows for:

• customer or operational outcome and value proposition;
• motivating problem and shortcomings of prior approaches;
• design objectives, constraints, and tradeoffs;
• the disclosed inventive mechanism or mechanisms;
• the deployed or prototyped implementation, if any;
• required versus optional features and actor/system boundaries;
• supported alternatives, substitutions, generalizations, and claim classes;
• non-negotiable business scope and acceptable deliberate gaps;
• disclaimers, definitions, prior-art characterizations, amendments, arguments, and other possible scope surrender.

For every row, identify the source and exact location, distinguish inventor-supplied fact from drafter inference, and assign confirmed, inferred, disputed, or missing. Do not collapse an aspirational objective into a disclosed invention.

Refresh the legal-source record and run or update a documented prior-art search. Search both the existing claims and the generalized inventive concepts likely to be used to capture alternatives. Preserve queries, databases, dates, classifications, full references, and pin cites. Use discovery sources to find art, then verify the actual primary references.

Create a deterministic evidence bundle containing the completed evidence manifest and every supplied prosecution, product, prior-art, and technical-evidence file. Sort entries, use stable internal paths and timestamps, and rebuild it whenever decision-controlling evidence changes. Use that one bundle as the required evidence packet component in every init, snapshot, and promote call. Changing its bytes creates a new version without changing the packet-label schema. Exclude the bundle and manifest from the manifest's own raw-evidence list; the state tool records the bundle's actual hash.

Phase 2 - Dispatch one fresh adversary

Create a unique context ID such as competitor-01. Spawn a fresh subagent that has not seen prior workaround reports, outer-agent proposed fixes, accepted gaps, or the desired answer. Provide only:

• the frozen candidate and version/hash;
• the completed handoff and adversary-safe factual/value brief;
• viewable drawings and relevant deployed-product facts;
• the current claim set and prosecution history needed to assess scope;
• public prior art and technical evidence needed for credible engineering.

Use the actual canonical spawned-agent or session identifier as the adversary context ID and preserve the spawn/handoff record. The state tool verifies distinct asserted IDs and report bytes, but cannot authenticate subagent freshness without that orchestrator provenance.

Do not give the adversary the full intake, full invention-thesis map, coverage ledger, accepted deliberate gaps, acceptable or unacceptable narrowing, desired claim classes, counsel decisions, or applicant capture strategy. Build assets/adversary-brief.md only from frozen packet evidence and remove those fields before dispatch. The outer agent retains the unredacted materials for adjudication.

Tell the subagent not to inspect other adversaries' folders. Give it references/workaround-protocol.md as its controlling contract. It must preserve the value proposition, systematically mutate claim limitations and system boundaries, and return technically specific alternatives with claim-by-claim avoidance maps. Require its UTF-8 text report to carry the exact context ID, version, packet hash, and decision headers from that protocol; the state tool rejects inconsistent metadata.

Do not disclose a target outcome, target number of cycles, or amendments the outer agent hopes to make. Do not reward superficial novelty: alternatives that merely remove the value, depend on impossible engineering, or rename a claimed element are not successful workarounds.

Phase 3 - Outer-agent adjudication

Independently verify every proposed workaround using integration-gates.md and the coverage ledger. Do not accept the adversary's infringement or umbrella conclusion. For each workaround:

1. Verify technical feasibility and whether the material value proposition remains.
2. Chart every limitation of every relevant independent claim. Identify the exact limitation allegedly absent or materially changed, and test other claim classes, actor combinations, direct infringement theories, and applicable equivalents risk separately. Do not use the doctrine of equivalents as a substitute for clear claim drafting.
3. Classify the workaround as not-a-workaround, outside-umbrella, umbrella-gap-supported, umbrella-gap-unsupported, or cannot-assess.
4. Cite the objectives, problem, solution mechanism, disclosure, deployed facts, and user-defined business scope supporting that classification. A label without an evidence trail is not a disposition.
5. For a material umbrella gap, identify the narrowest capture strategy that covers the alternative without unnecessarily claiming the result itself.
6. Apply every support, patentability, prosecution-history, and scope-quality gate before recommending or drafting a change.

Do not classify an alternative outside-umbrella merely because it is absent from the disclosure, uses a new technical mechanism, or conflicts with present claim language. Decide strategic alignment first; use umbrella-gap-unsupported when an aligned alternative lacks filing-date support.

Challenge false positives first. A workaround that actually meets another independent claim, sacrifices indispensable value, or merely exploits an implausible construction is not evidence that the application must change.