A contract-centered architecture names Skill, Harness and Scaffold as the ownership boundaries of an agentic runtime

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Posted 27 August, this paper treats enterprise agent deployment as a coordination problem across business units, app and AI teams, platform engineering, security, operations and data governance, and argues use-case benchmarks say nothing about who owns or admits a change. It proposes four responsibility objects as organizational contracts: Skill (versioned capability and workflow asset), Harness (runtime compiler and governor), Scaffold (execution and control boundary, NFR owner), and a CIO-governed data substrate held outside the runtime stack A = <S, H, X>. Its falsifiable claim is cost-aware capability-capacity separability, that within a declared operating region changing activated capability preserves the capacity-response interaction and changing Scaffold capacity preserves capability semantics, both within preregistered margins and a declared enforcement budget.