Mtm Contract — AI skill for Claude Code

MTM Contract

**MTM — *machine to machine*.** A contract is a handoff format. Today a person usually writes it for an agent; the same file works when one agent hands work to another. What has to be written down does not change either way.

**A framework for preventing hallucination and architectural drift in agentic AI coding.** A discipline for containing agentic AI's two recurring failure modes. Markdown-only, zero dependencies, Apache 2.0. From **Vast Intelligence Limited**.

**Project page: [nicemeetapp.com/mtm](https://nicemeetapp.com/mtm/)** — the same material as a page rather than a repository, in English and Traditional Chinese.

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A day you have probably had

A join starts returning nothing for records that visibly exist. The obvious move is to reason about it: stale cache, wrong identity, the data layer inferring a column type wrong. Three hypotheses, three changes, three rebuilds, no information — every layer above the database was internally consistent, so no amount of reading application code was going to surface it. One query against the database's own catalogue of columns ended it: the two sides of the join were different types.

The contract does not make you smarter. It makes you write down what must be true and how you checked it, **before** the agent generates anything — so that query happens in minute one instead of minute forty.

That is the whole idea: **put the cheap checks before the expensive generation.**

Start here — paste this into your agent

This is the method at working scale. Put it in `CLAUDE.md`, `.cursorrules`, or your system prompt. Nothing to install, no lock-in.

## Contract-first workflow

Before writing implementation code, classify the task by trigger — not by
how risky it feels. Any hit promotes it; never argue a task back down.

- Typo, copy, styling, version bump, one small file → just do it.
- One module, no trigger below → write three fields first (see below).
- Crosses a module bound