Skill: Agent Tooling Discipline (Structured Outputs Only)
Intent
- •Enable an agent to produce machine-checkable outputs (structured, versioned, rejectable) alongside concise human-readable summaries.
- •Ensure agents can be safely automated: outputs are deterministic, validated, and compatible with conformance gates.
Scope boundaries
- •In-scope: structured output discipline, error/diagnostic contracts, validation and rejection conditions, and replayability expectations.
- •Out-of-scope: implementation of agent tools/CLI; output formatting and UI details.
Primary concepts
- •Structured output: well-defined fields and identifiers that validators can accept/reject deterministically.
- •Rejectability: ability to fail fast on unknown fields, incompatible versions, missing provenance, or nondeterminism.
- •Replayability: same declared inputs produce same structured outputs.
Required inputs/context
- •Tool contract index: what structured outputs are expected per operation (validate/plan/explain/audit) and their versions.
- •Error taxonomy: categories/codes with remediation guidance expectations (conceptual).
- •Determinism & provenance requirements: what must be included for traceability and audit.
- •Golden structured outputs: representative examples used as oracles for validators.
Expected outputs
- •Structured outputs (minimum):
- •Operation result envelope: operation identifier, input contract versions referenced, output contract version produced.
- •Diagnostics: errors/warnings with category/code, stable location references, and remediation hints.
- •Provenance hooks: stable references that allow explain/provenance tracing.
- •Human-readable outputs:
- •Concise summary of what was validated/emitted/denied and why, consistent with structured diagnostics.
Acceptance criteria
- •Machine-checkable: outputs can be validated without ambiguity.
- •Deterministic: stable ordering and stable identifiers for repeated runs.
- •Strict: unknown fields or incompatible versions are rejected (especially for regulated workflows).
- •Consistent: human-readable summaries do not contradict structured outputs.
Validation signals
- •Schema/contract validation rejects unknown fields, missing required fields, and incompatible versions (deny).
- •Determinism checks fail if ordering/serialization changes without semantic change (deny).
- •Explain/provenance checks fail if required provenance anchors are missing (deny).
Guardrails & forbidden behaviors
- •Forbidden: free-form outputs that cannot be validated or deterministically parsed.
- •Forbidden: hiding important decisions only in prose (must be in structured outputs).
- •Forbidden: “best-effort” acceptance of unknown fields (must reject).
- •Escalation (HITL required):
- •Any weakening of validation strictness for high-assurance workflows.
Used by roles
- •All roles (cross-cutting requirement)