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paperclip/packages/paperclip-runner/docs/capability-disposition.md

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Capability Capability Disposition

This page explains how Capability classifies every Paperclip capability. The classification itself lives in a generated file, the Capability contract, which carries a "DO NOT EDIT" header and is rewritten by generate:capability-inventory. Read this page to understand what the generated table means; read the table for the authoritative rows.

Normative sources

Only two sources are normative:

  1. The Paperclip skill and its seven references (SKILL.md plus references/*.md), contributing 153 headings.
  2. The Paperclip Evals corpus, contributing 106 cases across 16 groups.

Together these produce 259 normative rows. The legacy Paperclip MCP tool surface (41 tools) is not a production capability surface; each MCP name is folded one-to-one into a normative eval row as a traceability alias and inherits that row's disposition. The contract prints the alias index only so the normative target is easy to audit.

The three dispositions

Every capability is classified as exactly one of:

  • control_plane_owned — the control plane performs this; no agent tool exists for it. Checkout, inbox resolution, blocker diagnostics, and status arbitration are control-plane-owned. In the explorer these appear as control-plane actions labelled "no agent tool exists for this," never as a callable tool.
  • always_agent_tool — the agent always has this as a semantic tool. Adding a comment, writing a document, opening an interaction, and registering a deliverable are always-agent-tool capabilities.
  • optional_agent_tool — the agent may have this tool, but only when a grant unlocks it. Absent the grant, the capability is not exposed and calling it is denied. See authorization and exposure.

The disposition is what makes the boundary legible: it states, per capability, whether an agent can act, must wait for the control plane, or needs a grant first.

Reading the generated contract

The contract has three parts:

  • Baseline counts — the heading, case, row, and alias totals above, plus the per-group case table.
  • Skill / reference rows — one row per heading, its primary disposition, and its file:line source anchor.
  • Legacy MCP alias index — each MCP name, the normative row it folds into, the inherited disposition, and its packages/mcp-server/src/tools.ts anchor.

Regenerating and checking

Generation reads the live in-repo skill/reference sources, the legacy MCP tool source, and the Paperclip Evals corpus, so it requires the external eval repository (via PAPERCLIP_EVALS_ROOT or a known local path) and is not part of the offline path. Checking and testing read only the checked-in derivatives under spec/capability/ and need no external repository.

# Rewrite every generated file. Requires the external Paperclip Evals corpus.
pnpm --filter @paperclipai/paperclip-runner generate:capability-inventory

# Validate counts, uniqueness, normative dispositions, one-to-one MCP folds,
# required fields, and generated-file drift. Offline; no external eval repo.
pnpm --filter @paperclipai/paperclip-runner check:capability-inventory

# Prove the validator rejects an independent MCP classification and rejects
# missing, duplicate, or unknown MCP folds. Offline.
pnpm --filter @paperclipai/paperclip-runner test:capability-inventory

check:capability-inventory diffs the checked-in generated files against what the live in-repo sources imply and fails on any drift or stale anchor, so the contract cannot silently fall out of sync.

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