Capability doesn't move the way code does.

Code moves by copying: clone the repo, run the binary, install the package. That works when the destination looks like the source — same stack, same harness, same company. It stops working the moment it doesn't. A skill built for one agent's harness doesn't run in another's. A prompt tuned for one team's conventions produces something else entirely on a different team's codebase. And some of the time, the code simply cannot cross the boundary at all — a different company, a different client, a wall neither side can remove.

What actually survives that crossing is intent: the principles a build rests on, the shape of what it produces, and — the part everyone skips — the specific ways it went wrong the first time. A recipe is that intent, written down in a fixed genre, addressed to an agent that has never seen your repository and has to arrive at your capability anyway.

This is not a prompt. A prompt is a request; it carries no memory of what breaks. It is not a skill package; a skill is a promise about your harness, silent about everyone else's. Marketplaces for either optimize for the wrong thing: volume of artifacts, not the compounding value of a build history. A prompt store gets you more prompts. It never gets you fewer failures.

A recipe gets you fewer failures, because it has a memory built into its shape. Every scar section is a debt someone already paid so the next reader doesn't have to. And the loop doesn't end at export: when a reader builds the recipe somewhere else, they report back — what they degraded, what broke that the document didn't warn about, what turned out to be wrong on their ground. That report becomes a new scar. The new scar raises the version. The recipe you read next month has already survived a failure you would otherwise hit this month.

That loop is the moat, not the file format. Anyone can write a markdown template with eleven headings. What compounds is a genre disciplined enough — gated on neutrality, gated on shown contracts, gated on earned scars — that reports keep landing in a shape worth reading, version after version, without one author's private conventions leaking into everyone else's build.

Transferable intent is not a better prompt and not a smaller skill. It's a third thing: a document that survives being handed to a stranger, checks its own outcome when they follow it, and gets strictly better every time someone does.