Capabilities

What CHP can do — declared, governed, provable.

A capability is a named, versioned unit of behavior that software declares it can do — with a contract, a risk tier, and the invariants that govern it. An agent or application discovers it, invokes it through a host, and the host decides whether that invocation is allowed before anything runs. Every result — success or denial — becomes replayable, tamper-evident evidence. The catalog below comes from the open adapter ecosystem: install one and the host discovers its capabilities automatically.

The capability lifecycle

Declared, discovered, invoked — and governed at the boundary.

The same six steps run whether a capability is called locally or across a mesh. It is the point where intent becomes effect — and the point where CHP puts a governed boundary.

01Declare

A capability, its contract, and the invariants that govern it.

02Discover

Found by an actor — filtered to what it is allowed to see.

03Invoke

A request crosses the boundary with a correlation context.

04Govern

Allowed, conditioned, or denied — before anything runs.

05Execute

Only if the gates pass does the handler run.

06Evidence

A tamper-evident, replayable record — including denials.

Capability vs. API

A capability is not an API call.

An API endpoint

A way to call a function over the network. It tells you the shape of the request. It does not, by itself, tell you who may call it, under what conditions it is allowed, or what actually happened when they did.

A CHP capability

A governed contract. It declares its authority and invariants, every invocation is checked against policy before it runs, and every outcome — allowed or denied — becomes evidence. The same capability can be reused and moved across environments without rewriting the integration.

What an invocation leaves behind

Inspect a real session.

A denial, a human approval, and a completed run — one hash-chained, replayable session. Open the denial to see its reason code; tamper a block and watch the chain break.

chp session tree · replayable

correlation_id=session-4a2f

agent://planning-assistant invoked schedule_technician — denied, granted, then completed. Click an event to inspect it.

  • The invocation was blocked at the boundary before anything ran.

    denial.code = policy_blocked

    service:dispatch entitlement is required

    retryable = false · a first-class outcome, not an exception

    capability
    schedule_technician:1.0.0
    gate
    policy

evidence chain · tamper-evident

each block hashes the one before it — chain verifies ✓

tip: click a block to alter it

Agent operations

AI & inference

Cloud

Code & DevOps

Data & knowledge

Files & storage

Infrastructure

Messaging

Network & APIs

Platform

Machine-readable, too.

This catalog is published for agents at /capabilities.txt and /.well-known/capabilities.json.

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