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Market fidelity

DNA's first rule of identity is that the owner names the schema. The practical consequence is market fidelity: standards DNA did not invent are consumed byte-faithful, under their owners' namespaces — no conversion, no lossy import into a DNA-flavored copy.

The rule

Standard apiVersion (owner) Native bundle
Agent Skills agentskills.io/v1 directory with SKILL.md (+ scripts/, references/)
Souls soulspec.org/v1 SOUL.md + IDENTITY.md + HEARTBEAT.md (+ soul.json)
AGENTS.md agents.md/v1 a plain AGENTS.md file

A marketplace SKILL.md is read as agentskills.io/v1 · Skill and stored in its own directory bundle exactly as its author wrote it. DNA gives you typed access and composes it into prompts, but it never rewrites the file into a DNA schema. When DNA writes it back, it comes back byte-identical.

The round-trip that guarantees it:

flowchart LR
    B["native bundle<br/>SKILL.md directory"] -->|Reader| D["typed Document<br/>agentskills.io/v1 · Skill"]
    D -->|typed access / composition| P["prompts & queries"]
    D -->|Writer| O["bytes out"]
    O -->|"byte-identical? (conformance kit)"| B

Enforced, not aspirational

This is a test, not a promise. The market-conformance suite runs the full pipeline — scan → typed access → prompt composition → write round-trip — against real marketplace bundles copied verbatim:

  • 31 real marketplace Skills (Anthropic + community collections).
  • The openai/codex AGENTS.md.
  • The soulspec starter templates.

The write round-trip must return each bundle byte-identical. The live fixture tree is scopes/market-integration/; provenance is recorded in tests/market-fixtures/NOTICE.md; the suites are test_market_conformance.py and market-conformance.test.ts.

Why byte-faithful matters

If DNA imported a SKILL.md into its own schema, three things would break:

  • Round-trips would lose data. Anything DNA's schema didn't model would be silently dropped on write.
  • Upgrades would fork. When the upstream standard evolves, a translated copy drifts; a byte-faithful one just keeps working.
  • Trust would erode. An author who publishes a Skill wants their Skill run, not a lossy re-interpretation of it.

Consuming the format under its owner's namespace sidesteps all three: the standard's owner keeps the namespace and the format, and DNA is a faithful reader of it. The round-trip fixpoint — the writer re-emits exactly what the reader read — is the mechanical guarantee behind that trust (see How to write a Reader/Writer).

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