Capability

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.

Why it matters

• 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.

In practice

• 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.

Not this

• 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.

Provenance