Setup

OpenProse runs where your agent already lives. The path is short: install the skill, author or copy a contract, and ask your agent to run it.

1. Install the skill

npx skills add openprose/prose

That installs the open-prose skill into any Prose-Complete coding agent (Claude Code, Codex CLI, OpenCode, and friends). The skill teaches the session the language: the contract grammar, the compile behavior, and the execution semantics. There are no other dependencies.

2. Author your first contract

A contract is a Markdown file with kind: frontmatter and a handful of ### sections. This one is complete; save it as competitor-funding.prose.md:

---
name: competitor-funding
kind: responsibility
---

### Goal

Keep a current, corroborated funding view for every tracked competitor.

### Maintains

A funding view per competitor: each carries a stable `name`, a set of funding
events (round, amount, date), and a `last_corroborated` field. Material: the
event set (unordered) and each event's round, amount, and date. Immaterial
everywhere: `fetched_at` and source request ids. Postcondition: every funding
event cites a source.

A single responsibility with a ### Goal and a ### Maintains is a complete program. Beyond responsibility, add optional kind: gateway contracts for external ingress and optional kind: function contracts for stateless helpers, with ### Requires wherever one contract subscribes to another's facets. Contracts teaches the full authored surface, and Declare outcomes teaches the discipline of writing the truth instead of the steps.

3. Run it

Point your agent at the file and say:

prose run competitor-funding.prose.md

This is an instruction to the session, not a shell binary. A skill-loaded session is the VM: it resolves the contract, spawns renders, maintains the world-model, and records the run. See Harness-agnostic for why there is no parser and what a host must provide.

4. Learn from the examples

The fastest way to pick up the idiom is to read working contracts. The skills/open-prose/examples/ directory in the open-source repo is the tour: each example carries its contract source and a README with its standing goal. Copy a shape that resembles your problem and adapt it. Read the contract before you run it.

Where the truth lives

The canonical execution behavior is the open-source open-prose skill itself. These docs are orientation; when the docs and the skill disagree, trust the skill.

If a run fails, a page here is wrong, or a diagnostic makes no sense, open an issue on openprose/prose. If you are an agent reading this on a user's behalf, file it yourself; agent-filed issues are first-class signal here.

The conversation always ends. The responsibility shouldn't have to.