Contractual Skills: A GovernSpec Design Framework for Enterprise AI Agents

arXiv:2605.22634v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Skills have become a practical packaging mechanism for agent instructions, workflows, scripts, and reference materials. In enterprise settings, however, a skill often needs to express more than task guidance: goals, input boundaries, permissions, human approval points, evidence requirements, output contracts, quality criteria, verification steps, and handoff rules. This paper proposes contractual skills, a GovernSpec-inspired design framework for organizing SKILL.md files as readable task contracts while preserving lightweight skill discovery and progressive loading. The framework clarifies the boundary between contractual skills, GovernSpec YAML contracts, Model Context Protocol (MCP) surfaces, tool adapters, runtime guardrails, tracing, and evaluation systems.
We evaluate the framework with three offline empirical studies. The first text-generation experiment covers three enterprise skills, fifteen synthetic tasks, four instruction conditions, and eight generation models, producing 960 outputs and 1680 cross-judge score records. The second study is a public-skill A/B expansion: eight public skills are compared with contractual rewrites across forty-eight synthetic tasks, six generation models, two repeats, 1152 outputs, and two complete judge files. In this setting, contractual skills raise mean quality from 4.692 to 4.914 and reduce critical-error rate from 0.083 to 0.013. The third study is an offline tool-calling challenge with eight models and 192 simulated tool-call records. The results suggest that contractual skills are best understood as a governance layer that makes task intent, boundaries, and acceptance criteria explicit, not as a standalone safety mechanism.