The Case
The Case
The argument: skills should be a packaging format, not a source format. The flagship essay states it; The Two Assets and The Explainer Is the Source develop it; FAIR Skills corroborates it from outside; Comparisons and Related Projects locate it.
A skill is a compile target, not an authoring surface — and treating it as the source of record costs you traceability and a moat that depreciates as models improve.
Restating canonical knowledge is a commodity. Two things are not: provenance — the asset every Foundry carries — and the enforced checks a domain builds on top, with the empirical referee as the marquee example.
A cast artifact is flattened by design — that is what makes it a good package and a poor source. The structure understanding needs can only live upstream, which is why the Knowledge Base is written for a person and the skill is compiled from it.
The FAIR principles were written in 2016 for a traceability crisis research data had already lived through. Reasoning only from what survives as models improve, The Case landed on two of FAIR's own reusability sub-principles. A skill authored as its own source is un-FAIR by construction; a Foundry makes FAIRness fall out of the build.
Where the Foundry Pattern sits relative to adjacent approaches — stable positioning (Part A) plus a dated, periodically-refreshed landscape snapshot of specific systems (Part B) on the runtime-vs-compile-time axis.
A gracious map locating neighbor projects against the axes the Foundry Pattern cares about — credit on shared axes, distinctness only where verification holds.