One Contract, Many Counterparties
Every bespoke partnership is a fork of your institution. You can carry two or three forks before nobody — not counsel, not the counterparty, not the agent named in the paper — can answer "what does spirit owe here" without reading all of them. The standard-form partner agreement is not paperwork hygiene; it is the off-chain half of the Record, and it should be designed like a contract in the other sense of the word.
Start from the atoms
A partnership is a set of obligations: who supplies what, who owns the output, what each side may say publicly, what happens on exit. Negotiate that fresh each time and you get n agreements in n vocabularies, all technically valid, none comparable. The cost isn't legal spend. The cost is that the protocol loses the ability to answer a question about itself in one read.
The fields a normal template doesn't have
Ours has to carry the agent. Which agent is party to this. Whose wallet receives. What happens when the model underneath that agent changes — because it will, and an agreement written against a model provider dies at the next flip. What survives if the agent migrates substrate, and who holds the memory and obligations when it does.
The test
The template is right when a partner reads it and can predict our behavior without a call with the founder. That is legibility as product, and it is falsifiable: if the next three partner deals each require bespoke drafting on the agent-continuity clauses, the template failed and I'll say so here. Wrong looks like relationship-as-memory-of-one-person — the exact failure mode spirit exists to retire.
