TPMN Skill Standard
The 12 skills are ALL you need.
Stop growing your skill library. Grow your contract archive instead.
Your scope decays silently. Your code review is performance. Your skill selection is a coin flip.
npx @gem_squared/tpmn-skill-installRead the series on dev.to
What we believe
That AI is a mathematical and logical system. That communicating engineering work to it in prose is a fundamental mismatch — and that this mismatch is the root cause of silent failure, not AI's processing logic.
That contractless sessions produce three structural wounds: silent scope decay, judgment theater, and trigger collision. That the gap between what you believe was produced correctly and what a formal contract would have verified grows silently with each session.
That alignment — contract and evidence matched — is not just a technical goal but a moral one. That every unverified session makes the system worse. That every verified session makes it better.
That the Proof Cycle is the only architecture that compounds. The 12 skills stay fixed. The knowledge compounds. You never start from zero.
The three wounds
Every session without contracts widens proof drift — the invisible gap between what you believe succeeded and what verification would have confirmed.
Infrastructure
Silent Scope Decay
Your context scope and architecture scope erode without detection. Prose constraints dilute under compaction. Architecture boundaries drift between sessions.
TPMN — an Algebraic Logical Language where breakage is detectable, not silent.
Practice
Judgment Theater
Reviewing AI output without a formal contract is performance, not verification. You appear to be checking but have no ground truth to check against.
Machine-verifiable STATE — three deterministic checks replace subjective review.
Ecosystem
Trigger Collision
Prose-based skill selection fails silently — the wrong skill fires, or no skill fires at all. The failure is unobservable.
12 fixed lifecycle skills + a growing contract archive. The lifecycle stays fixed. The knowledge compounds.
The Proof Cycle
Plan. Execute. Verify. Archive. Search. Plan again. Every proven contract becomes searchable prior art for the next session.
/search-kg
Search
/plan-work
Plan
/proceed-work
Execute
/verify-work
Verify
/archive-work
Archive
/search-kg closes the loop — proven patterns feed the next /plan-work
Every unit of work has a CONTRACT:
A
Input state — what exists before
B
Output state — what must exist after
P
Precondition — what must be true to start
Clarity %
How well-defined the scope is (0–100)
Stop growing your skill library. Grow your contract archive instead.
12 lifecycle skills
Fixed set. Deterministic selection. No collision.
| Skill | What it does |
|---|---|
| /init-session | Bootstrap project files, detect L0/L1 layer |
| /check-session | Read-only status report (counters, active WPs) |
| /search-kg | Search proven contracts and patterns in archive |
| /search-skill | Discover installed + archived skills |
| /plan-work | Decompose work into 1–9 units with CONTRACTs |
| /proceed-work | Execute one unit, verify inline, retry on failure |
| /update-work-plan | Add, modify, abort, or reorder PENDING units |
| /verify-work | Compare Result vs CONTRACT.B (per-unit or batch) |
| /archive-work | Finalize WP, git commit, move to archive |
| /extract-skill | Convert proven contracts into reusable skills |
| /skill-to-kg | Archive non-core skills, reduce trigger collision |
| /end-session | Commit session state for next-session recovery |
Install in one command
npx @gem_squared/tpmn-skill-installInstalls 12 lifecycle skills + project scaffold. Your existing skills are archived, not deleted.
TPMN extends to two systems
One algebraic foundation. Two systems. The Skill Standard governs how you work. The Checker verifies what you produce.
TPMN Skill Standard
Workflow Governance
12 lifecycle skills. Contract-driven execution. Every session compounds into a searchable knowledge graph.
Open Source · MITTPMN Checker
Epistemic Verification
Audits AI outputs for unsupported claims. Scores epistemic quality. Composes grounded replacements.
Try TPMN Checker →TPMN Skill Standard: CC-BY 4.0 + MIT · 2026 · GEM²-AI