SkillEffect: Checked Lowering for Memory-Bounded Agent Tools

Abstract

Agent Skills can specify procedural and resource obligations for tool use, and language models instantiate them as concrete programs. However, when models turn this guidance into code for existing tool interfaces, even a semantically correct program may load an entire input and exceed the memory available to one tool call. We present SkillEffect, a checked-lowering runtime for computations with a recoverable source relation, an audited bounded implementation, and a registered output postcondition. Before granting execution authority, an independent checker rebuilds each proposed lowering from the submitted program and immutable input. Every relation plugin supplies a source recognizer, input-fact extractor, bounded-IR constructor, arena-bound function, and postcondition; one common runtime provides checked selection, bounded-VM execution, atomic capacity leasing, and staged publication. Generality in SkillEffect is architectural rather than automatic: each supported computation requires an audited relation plugin, while the dispatch, resource-control, execution, and publication mechanisms are shared across plugins. Across six operator families, bounded access substantially reduces peak memory and improves completion under externally fixed caps. Six plugins instantiate the same contract across five execution patterns, from streaming reduction to bounded-heap Top-k. The XLSX onboarding study and Top-k extension show that a new relation and a new retained-state pattern reuse the same trust boundary, while the checker accepts all evaluated legal configurations and rejects all adversarial proposals. Together, these results show that one checked-lowering architecture can enforce heterogeneous registered memory relations at Agent tool dispatch.