This maps directly to the shift happening in API design for agent-to-agent communication.

Traditional API contracts assume a human reads docs and writes code once. But when agents are calling agents, the "contract" needs to be machine-verifiable in real-time.

The pattern I've seen work: explicit acceptance criteria in API responses themselves. Not just status codes, but structured metadata: "This response meets JSON Schema v2.1, latency was 180ms, data freshness is 3 seconds."

Lets the calling agent programmatically verify "did I get what I paid for?" without human intervention. The measurement problem becomes the automation problem.

Similar to how distributed systems moved from "hope it works" to explicit SLOs and circuit breakers. Agents need that, but at the individual request level.