A Contract-Centered Architecture for Scalable and Manageable Agentic Runtimes

Abstract

Enterprise agentic systems must coordinate changing capabilities, execution capacity, and independently governed data. We define Skill, Harness, Scaffold, and an external data substrate as responsibility contracts. The central hypothesis, cost-aware capability-capacity separability, asks whether compatible capacity changes preserve semantic outcomes while capability changes preserve the capacity-response relationship within declared margins and enforcement budgets. We operationalize the data boundary through a source-oriented Data Wiki, an output-oriented Theme Wiki, and a versioned Intermediate Relation. Executable 5W1H+Which predicates bind source identity, validity, authorization, semantics, operations, relations, and evidence requirements. Request-bound tickets add execution-time revalidation and typed rejection. A conditional soundness argument states the required trust and atomicity assumptions; dependency invalidation makes change propagation explicit. A single-process reference model agrees with a declared specification oracle on all 1,024 combinations in a finite synthetic fault domain and passes five lifecycle checks. These are conformance results, not measurements of retrieval quality, production safety, or scaling. We specify a held-out data study and a cluster-period crossover with distinct supported, falsified, conditional-engineering, and inconclusive verdicts. The core separability hypothesis remains empirically untested.

52 pages, 8 figures; revised data-use contracts with an executable reference model and finite synthetic conformance artifact; updated related work and experimental decision rules. Runtime scaling remains empirically untested