Weekly Update - March 16, 2026: Modular skills, whitepaper to peer review, and behind-the-scenes momentum.

A lighter week on the main branch, but a productive one. Our third whitepaper is complete and in peer review ahead of ISPI 2026, we published five new posts including two industry guides and a video, completed a meaningful infrastructure refactor, and continued advancing payment integration and internationalization and deeper benchmarking work on feature branches.

Content Published Last Week

Monday (Mar 9): "Weekly Update - March 9, 2026"

Tuesday (Mar 10): "AI Collaboration in Insurance" A practical guide for insurance professionals on leveraging AI collaboration for underwriting, claims processing, and risk assessment while maintaining regulatory compliance.

Wednesday (Mar 11): "What PAICE Is Actually Testing For" It's not about AI knowledge—PAICE watches for specific behaviors during your conversation, whether you question confident claims, ask for sources, or catch things that don't add up.

Thursday (Mar 12): "AI Collaboration for Cybersecurity Professionals" How cybersecurity professionals can build effective AI collaboration practices for threat analysis and incident response without compromising verification rigor.

Friday (Mar 13): Video - "The AI Adoption Illusion" A 7-minute NotebookLM deep dive into why AI adoption metrics measure software activity, not human competence—and why verification judgment is the real predictor of safe AI integration.

Technical Improvements

Skills Architecture Refactor

Replaced all copied skill bundles with symlinks to their standalone repositories and added a link-skills.sh setup script. This removed approximately 4,500 lines of duplicated content from the main repo and added three new skill links. Each skill now versions independently (via the skills-provenance standard) reducing merge conflicts and enabling reuse across projects. Context files were preserved and renamed for quick reference.

Upcoming Whitepaper: Closing the Collaboration Gap

Our third whitepaper, "Closing the Collaboration Gap: A Behavioral Skill Framework for Human-AI Performance Improvement," is now complete and undergoing peer review. The paper presents the behavioral science foundation behind PAICE's five-dimension assessment model, examining how organizations can move beyond adoption metrics to measure and improve the human skills that determine whether AI collaboration succeeds or fails.

We're preparing for release on March 31 at the International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI) 2026 conference. This is an audience deeply aligned with PAICE's mission of measurable human performance in the age of AI.

Work in Progress

Several feature branches are advancing toward future releases:

Payment Integrations: Lemon Squeezy webhook parsing, token hashing, and premium feature gating are functional and under testing. This will unlock Pro-tier capabilities for individual users as well as teams and organizations. Stripe already works independently with integration efforts advancing, and we're exploring a new token-based payment model for cohort assessments.
Internationalization: Behind the scenes, PAICE.work has already learned to speak Urdu for the assessment flow. Spanish, French, and Portuguese internationalization will soon follow in successive releases. These represent our first steps toward multilingual assessments that businesses in the Western Hemisphere can use to evaluate AI collaboration capability across their global workforce.
Cohort Management: Cohort creation, membership management, and assessment scheduling are functional and under testing. We're working toward SSO integration and a new cohort dashboard that will include a cohort-specific leaderboard.

Open Source Projects

We continue to extract and open-source tools and standards that grew out of our internal PAICE development. Recent additions to our GitHub:

AI Capability Reference — A structured reference for AI capability tiers, designed to support assessment design and scoring calibration across different AI maturity levels. Now with MCP and JSON endpoints so that PAICE.work can call the most recent news directly.
Hardguard25 — The token-based identity and session integrity standard we use for cohort assessments. Designed for privacy-first environments where traditional auth is inappropriate. This is the token standard that powers PAICE.work's cohort assessments.
Skill A11y Audit — An agent skill for automated accessibility auditing, now a standalone repo following this week's skills architecture refactor. This is what allows PAICE.work to audit its own accessibility frequently.
Skill Provenance — Metaskill for tracking agent skill identity, staleness, and intent across sessions, surfaces, and platforms. Every skill now includes a provenance.json file that describes its purpose, version, and dependencies. Rated 8.4/10 in the ProSkills catalog of top 100 agentic skills last Tuesday.
PAICE–NEAR Integration — Our TEE-protected inference and on-chain attestation integration, first showcased at NEARCON 2026 last month and highlighted in our second whitepaper "Verifiable Human-AI Collaboration: Privacy-Preserving Assessment with Cryptographic Integrity", which describes our Confidential Mode running on NEAR's Confidential Compute.

Each of these is a work in progress, and we welcome contributions.

Platform Stability

Platform maintained 100% uptime with no incidents. All systems operating normally: standard and Confidential Mode assessments, results generation with on-chain attestation, cohort management, email notifications, and analytics processing.

What's Next

This week: Continue payment integration testing, begin preparing the internationalization pipeline for assessment prompts, and continuing to publish daily content exploring AI governance and organizational readiness themes.

The Week in Numbers

5 blog posts published (1 video + 2 industry guides + 1 assessment guide + 1 weekly update)
3 commits merged to main
70 files changed, ~4,500 lines of skill duplication removed
3 feature branches advancing in parallel
100% uptime, zero incidents

Why This Week Matters

Not every week produces a headline feature, and that's by design. The skills architecture refactor is the kind of infrastructure investment that pays compound interest: faster skill iteration, cleaner version control, and the ability to share agent capabilities across projects without copy-paste drift. Meanwhile, payment integration and internationalization work on feature branches signal the next phase of PAICE—sustainable revenue and broader accessibility. The foundation keeps getting stronger even when the surface looks quiet.

Thank You

To the organizations and individuals following our progress: your patience during infrastructure weeks and your enthusiasm during feature launches both matter equally. We're building for the long term, and every week moves us closer.

Get Involved:

Take the assessment (free, always)
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Read the whitepaper (comprehensive framework)
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