A skill.
One named person's way of running one family of machine. It is chosen by name before the work starts, it runs under that name, it is metered by the hour the machine actually works, and the person it came from can end it.
A skill is one person and one family of machine.
Not a category. Not a job description. Not a model trained on everybody who has ever run this class of machine. A skill is a single registry entry, and an entry has exactly two things in its name: a person, and the family of machine they were working when the record was made.
The pairing is deliberate and it is narrow on purpose. A person who runs two families of machine has two entries, built from different sessions, licensed separately and counted separately. An entry does not generalize sideways into machines it was never recorded on, because a way of working is a way of working something — the reach and the balance and the timing belong to the iron as much as to the hands.
What an entry is built from is equally narrow: sessions that person recorded, in their own seat, on their own machine, on their own work, and consented to at the moment each one was made. Nothing else goes in. A session someone else recorded does not go in. A session recorded before the consent that covers it does not go in, because consent is read when the record is made and never looked up afterwards. How admission works
From a name on a list to a row that pays someone.
Everything this page promises is a promise about one of these six steps. If a claim cannot be pointed at a step, it is not a claim we make.
Fig. 1 — One licensed hour. Sealed objects carry a mark; dashed rules are boundaries information does not cross.
An entry starts in somebody's own seat, on somebody's own day.
Not a studio, not a rig, not a test cell. A person doing their own work on their own machine, having agreed to that day being recorded before it was.
What a skill promises, and what it does not.
These are the whole of it. A licensee's counsel should be able to read this table and find nothing on the left that is not in the paper, and nothing in the paper that is not on the left.
| What is promised | How it is kept |
|---|---|
| It runs under a name | The entry is addressed by the name of the person it came from. A machine is told which name it is running before it runs anything, and a licensee's own records carry that name. |
| It is chosen deliberately | A person on the crew selects it by name before the work starts. There is no default and no last-used: a machine carrying yesterday's choice forward would be running on nobody's authority. |
| It is metered by the hour the machine works | The act that clears the machine to run is the act that starts the meter. The clearance and the invoice come off one signed row, so neither can be adjusted without the other. |
| The hour paid is the hour invoiced | There is no second ledger. The row a licensee is billed from is the row the person is paid from, and both parties read the same row. |
| It can be ended by the person it came from | It stops for new work at once; a job already underway finishes, because stopping a machine mid-pass is its own hazard. That is the one delay in it, and neither we nor a licensee can extend it. |
| It does not change in the field | A released package is fixed. It does not learn on a licensee's machine, and it does not drift. It changes when a new release is built, signed and deliberately put there. |
Not promised. A skill is not a warranty of any outcome on any job. No part of any safety case rests on anything we supply, and we are not a designer, manufacturer, integrator or supplier of any machine. A skill proposes; a person authorizes; safety has veto. What we stand behind is the money owed, the count, and the deletion — never the machine, never the job, never the output. The licence in full
A skill stays a separate thing, and that is the whole reason any of this can be kept.
Two of the promises above — that an hour can be traced back to one person, and that one person can end what came from them — are the ones most often made in this field and least often kept. They are kept here because of a decision taken before anything was built: each person's contribution stays a separately addressable thing, selected by name, and is never fitted together with anyone else's into one set of weights.
The reason that decision matters is not a matter of taste. Where contributions have been dissolved into a single trained model, checking afterwards that one person's influence was removed is not a hard engineering problem waiting on better tools. It is a formal result, and Thudi, Jia, Shumailov and Papernot stated it at USENIX Security in 2022:
We cannot prove unlearning by showing that the parameters of the unlearned model are obtained without training on the unlearned data.
Thudi, Jia, Shumailov & Papernot, On the Necessity of Auditable Algorithmic Definitions for Machine Unlearning, USENIX Security Symposium, 2022.
Put another way: whether a model has forgotten something is not a property of the model. It is a property of its history, and histories are attested, not measured. Any offer to inspect a delivered model and confirm that someone's work has been taken out of it is an offer of something that cannot exist.
So this system does not ask anyone to take that on faith, because it never creates the problem. Ending a skill here is a deletion and a de-listing of a thing that was always kept on its own. It is ordinary work, done to a date, confirmed in writing. What ending one actually involves
What a skill is not.
Four things a reader might reasonably assume, each of which is wrong, and each of which matters commercially.
It is not a dataset
A licensee never receives a session, or part of one, or anything identifying the person beyond the name the licence runs under. What crosses to a machine is a sealed package and a digest of what went into it — never the contents.
It is not an average of everybody
An entry is built from one person's sessions. Where a way of working is unusual, that is preserved rather than smoothed away, because the unusual way can be the reason a name is wanted in particular.
It is not a score on the person
A record is never supplied to assess the person it came from — not to an employer, not to an insurer, not to anyone else. There is no ranking, no grading, and no comparison of a person against their own earlier work.
It is not perpetual
It runs while the person it came from is content for it to run, and stops when they are not. A licensee should know that before signing rather than after, and price its work accordingly.
When a job needs several, they are licensed together and still counted apart.
Most real work does not sit inside one entry. A site needs more than one machine, a machine gets used for more than one kind of task, and a crew changes through a season. Under our licence from Even Steven we may offer a set — several named skills assembled under one paper — or a series, which runs from one name across more than one family of machine.
Licensing several together changes the paper and the price. It changes nothing about the objects. A set is a shelf, not a stew: every member is still chosen by name, still metered on its own, still attributed to the person it came from, and still ended by that person alone, with the rest of the set carrying on. Sets and series
Have a machine, or a job, that needs a name on it?
Tell us what the machine is and what the work is. The specification is available under NDA.