Skill Scaffold

Concept of the skill

Skill scaffolding is protocol-backed authoring, not free-form prompt writing. A new skill is not just a Markdown file; it is a package contract that has to be discoverable by simple Agent Skills runtimes, queryable by Skill Graph tooling, understandable to a future agent, and honest about its evidence state.

The scaffold separates six layers:

• Discovery surface — name and description, for runtimes that preload only minimal metadata.
• Skill Graph contract — classification, activation, relations, grounding, and the Understanding fields.
• Sidecar state — audit-state.json for schema version, owner, freshness, drift, eval state, routing-eval state, lifecycle, portability, runtime telemetry, and the audit verdicts.
• Teaching body — the sections the agent reads after the skill activates.
• Supporting resources — optional references/, scripts/, and assets/ that load on demand instead of bloating the body.
• Verification receipts — lint, protocol checks, routing evals, drift checks, and human/domain review.

Separating these layers is what turns a text-heavy instruction file into a routable graph node rather than a decorative Markdown file.

Coverage