Contract

Ask a contract what a capability does, and it actually answers. A contract is the declaration, both machine-readable and human-readable, of what a capability does, what it needs to run, what it promises to callers, and what it deliberately does not do.

cdad init scaffolds a contract as three files:contract.yaml as the source of truth, plus generatedcontract.json and contract.md. Editing the generated files by hand and leaving the YAML untouched is one of the toolkit's named anti-patterns, because the three copies drift apart and nobody can tell which one is real.

Every contract in a repo becomes one node in thecapability graph, so a change to one contract's dependencies is visible before it turns into a surprise.