Skip to content
Agent OS
AOS-PROD-011 Normative foundation

Action and Provider Interoperability

Action and Provider Interoperability: scope, decisions, requirements, evidence, risks, and traceability for the Agent OS programme.

Edit on GitHub →

Action and Provider Interoperability

This specification defines a user-facing capability in terms of entities, actions, history, consent, recovery, accessibility, and provider contracts.

Table of Contents

Purpose and Scope

Area: Product System.

This specification defines a user-facing capability in terms of entities, actions, history, consent, recovery, accessibility, and provider contracts.

This document owns the semantics implied by Action and Provider Interoperability. It does not assert that every described subsystem already exists. It defines the target model, constraints, evidence needed to trust an implementation, and the boundary with adjacent documents.

Normative Position

  1. Model visible objects as stable entities with typed relationships, provenance, authority, schemas, views, actions, and history.
  2. Providers publish typed actions and declarative surfaces; users and agents receive the same semantic operations with different authority and confirmation policy.
  3. Composition and transclusion preserve origin and permission rather than copying opaque app state.

Operating Model

The operating model is contract-first and evidence-driven. A component declares its authority, resources, lifecycle, error model, cancellation and timeout behavior, observability, version, and compatibility promise. Backends are replaceable only when the same conformance suite passes and no forbidden platform type leaks into portable layers.

Implementation proceeds through a reference model or mock, deterministic QEMU evidence where relevant, documentation-first physical hardware, and quality-hardware evidence. Pixel 9 adapters remain quarantined according to ADR-0004.

Requirements

  • R01. Model visible objects as stable entities with typed relationships, provenance, authority, schemas, views, actions, and history.
  • R02. Providers publish typed actions and declarative surfaces; users and agents receive the same semantic operations with different authority and confirmation policy.
  • R03. Composition and transclusion preserve origin and permission rather than copying opaque app state.
  • R04. Specify normal, partial, denied, timeout, cancellation, restart, upgrade, and permanent-failure behavior.
  • R05. Expose structured diagnostics without leaking secrets or vendor-specific implementation details.
  • R06. Link material unknowns to a claim and, when testable, an experiment with an owner and gate.
  • R07. Update affected documentation and task data when evidence changes the model.

Failure and Degradation

Degradation must be explicit rather than accidental. The system reports capability absence, reduced quality, unavailable provider, stale data, or unsafe condition through typed states. It must not silently fall back to broader authority, unrestricted legacy execution, unverified firmware, lossy data migration, or irreversible agent action.

Recovery defines what state is retained, reconstructed, re-enrolled, compensated, or intentionally discarded. Unsupported hardware or providers are rejected at binding time where possible.

Evidence and Acceptance

  • Vertical slices across at least three domains.
  • Usability and action-coverage studies.
  • Migration, permission and provenance tests.
  • Evidence records target identity, hardware revision, firmware, source commit, toolchain, configuration, seed, timestamps, artifacts, expected result, actual result, and reviewer.
  • Acceptance requires the referenced tasks to meet their own criteria; prose completion is not implementation completion.

Implementation Obligations

Task Obligation Priority Gate/Milestone Verification
AOS-PROD-121 Specify action-provider manifests and adapter contracts P1 M2 Run the relevant document, schema, conformance, build, experiment, or hardware checks; independently review boundary compliance and acceptance criteria.

Risks and Open Questions

  • A universal entity model can become vague or over-normalized.
  • Third-party providers may expose incomplete or misleading actions.
  • Malleability can conflict with consistency, accessibility and support.
  • Open-question rule: an unanswered high-impact question becomes a claim/experiment record and cannot be hidden in meeting notes.
  • Stop rule: work stops or changes track when legal rights, recovery, debug access, safety, or the required evidence path is unavailable.

Related Documents

Planning Reference Anchors

Degradation

AOS-PROD-121 — Specify action-provider manifests and adapter contracts; AOS-PROD-121 — Specify action-provider manifests and adapter contracts

Native First

AOS-PROD-121 — Specify action-provider manifests and adapter contracts; AOS-PROD-121 — Specify action-provider manifests and adapter contracts