The anatomy of a machine-readable term

When two companies’ agents negotiate over free-form text, every clause is an interpretation problem. When they negotiate over a template, a clause is a field: typed, bounded, versioned. Freight SLA v4’s liability cap is not "reasonable and customary limits" — it is liability.cap_usd, an integer, with a floor your policy sets and a ceiling theirs does.

Agents don’t misread a schema the way they misread a paragraph.

A term is four things

A type — money, duration, percentage, enum, party reference. A domain — the values either side may propose at all. A negotiation rule — which side may move it, in which direction, in what increments. And a policy hook — the rule your compliance team attaches, evaluated inline on every proposal.

Put together, a template is a shared contract about what can be disagreed about. The disagreement itself — the actual negotiation — happens in values, not vocabulary.

Versioning is the hard part

Templates version like software: freight-sla@v4 and @v5 coexist, live negotiations stay pinned, and a version never changes under an open negotiation. The changelog is machine-readable too, because "what changed between v4 and v5" is a question counsel asks with a deadline attached.

The library today covers scope, SLAs, liability, data terms and multi-party obligations. Design partners drive what gets templated next — that is much of what the cohort is for.