Most agent frameworks miss a key distinction: what a skill is vs how it executes

I've been thinking about how we structure "skills" in agent systems. Across different frameworks, "skills" can mean very different things: * a tool / function * a role or persona * a multi-step workflow But there are actually two separate questions here: **What does the skill describe?** * persona * tool * workflow **How does it execute?** * stateless (safe to retry, parallelize) * stateful (has side effects, ordering matters) Most frameworks mix these together. That works fine in demos — but starts to break in real systems. For example: * a tool that reads data behaves very differently from one that writes data * a workflow that analyzes is fundamentally simpler than one that publishes results Once stateful steps are involved, you need more structure: * checkpoints * explicit handling of side effects * sometimes even a "dry-run" step before execution A simple way to think about it: **→ skills = (what it describes) × (how it executes)** Curious how others are thinking about this. Do you explicitly distinguish between these two dimensions in your agent workflows?