{
  "id": "capability",
  "title": "Capability",
  "version": 0.1,
  "status": "draft",
  "author": "Pete Dainty",
  "updated": "2026-07-05",
  "summary": "A Capability is a declared, invocable action an origin can perform or vouch for. It is the origin's offer to do work, not just to display content.\n",
  "definition": "A named, described and specified function an origin exposes for invocation, with defined inputs, outputs and provenance. Capability is what an origin can do. Content is only what it can show.\n",
  "rationale": [
    "Capability over content. In an agentic internet the useful unit is an action an agent can take, not a paragraph it must read.",
    "Declaring capabilities explicitly, in JSON, llms.txt and an MCP manifest, makes an origin discoverable and usable by machines without bespoke integration.",
    "A capability is a promise. Backing it with provenance is what makes the promise trustworthy rather than merely available."
  ],
  "examples": [
    "ask. Resolve a question against the corpus and return a cited answer.",
    "definitions. Return a canonical definition and its relationships.",
    "provenance. Return the verifiable source of a claim.",
    "research. Expose a body of work for retrieval and reasoning."
  ],
  "antipatterns": [
    "A page that describes what an origin could do, with no invocable surface behind it.",
    "Capabilities without declared inputs or outputs, so only a human reading docs can use them."
  ],
  "related": [
    "invocation",
    "provenance",
    "origin"
  ],
  "projections": [
    "html",
    "markdown",
    "json",
    "jsonld",
    "llms",
    "mcp"
  ]
}