Cupel: A Framework for Professional Competence Provenance

Verifying Human Expertise in a World of Capable Machines. Position Paper and Framework Specification v0.3. The deployment of autonomous AI agents into professional workflows has created a structural verification problem in the human layer those systems depend on. This paper identifies the resulting gap, characterises competence below the abstraction layer, and proposes Cupel, an open framework specification for professional competence provenance. v0.3 updates: re-leads with the supervision gap and apprenticeship pipeline collapse; adds formal treatment of competence below the abstraction layer; expands bibliography; softens commercial framing toward neutral specification language.