Artifact-Bearing Smoke Profiles for Workflow Integration

Asynchronous research services often expose a deceptively small integration boundary: submit a job, poll until a terminal status appears, and read an artifact manifest. A wiring problem at that boundary can turn a missing artifact, stale run identifier, malformed manifest, or trace gap into a false success. This paper defines an artifact-bearing smoke profile for that boundary and evaluates it against a local fixture-harness evidence package assembled for this study. The executed evidence contains a 480-row prediction table over 45 finite fixture cases, nine regimes, and five seeds, plus a finite symbolic audit over 64 Boolean assignments. The contract profile produced no false passes on non-pass fixture rows, detected status, manifest, and trace boundary violations in the local matrix, and preserved the distinction between fixture evidence and production reachability. The result supports a scoped claim: a compact smoke profile can make the dispatch, terminal-status, manifest-integrity, byte-integrity, and trace-continuity obligations explicit enough to reject targeted local failures before a generated artifact is treated as a valid research output.