Don't Prompt Your Agents. Equip Them: Skillware as a Modular Standard for Sovereign, Auditable, and Deterministic Capability Execution for Logical Systems

Vladimiros Peilivanidis

Current autonomous logical systems rely on a fragile assumption: that language models should dynamically write code, guess API payloads, and memorize operational constraints through prompt engineering. In practice, this burns massive context windows, inflates API bills, and produces brittle agents that fail unpredictably in production. In this work, we present Skillware, an open architectural framework and capability registry that formally separates what an agent wants to do from how that task is executed. Instead of prompting models with loose text instructions or markdown files baptized as 'skills', Skillware equips them with modular, versioned software capability bundles. Much like skill hotkeys in video games that execute deterministically under fixed world rules, each bundle combines a typed JSON input contract, deterministic Python code, task directives, bundled datasets, and automated unit tests. In-process adapters translate these capabilities into native tool declarations for any model, from frontier cloud APIs to local open-weight runtimes with zero network latency. Evaluating 23 frontier and open-weight models across 368 benchmark conditions, we show that small local…