The denominator

If the quirq counts delivered value, something has to say what the value is. Every candidate except one fails under optimization pressure.

The candidates that fail

The remaining candidate is the one the economy already uses everywhere else: the price the buyer commits to before the work starts.

What a century of contract theory says

This is not a compromise; it is the load-bearing choice. Organizations exist because outcomes are cheaper to buy than to specify act-by-act (Coase, Williamson). The essence of organization is metering contribution (Alchian and Demsetz). When effort is unobservable, contracts must be written on verifiable signals (Holmström), and when only some dimensions are measured, effort migrates to the measured ones (Holmström and Milgrom), which is why the measured dimension had better be the outcome itself, valued by the party who pays for it.

Hours became the unit of knowledge work precisely because outcomes were too expensive to verify. The agentic workspace, which observes every action as a side effect of hosting the work, removes that excuse. The budget B, set by the outcome's owner, is the hardest-to-game value signal available: a willingness to pay, committed before execution, by the only party with standing to say what the outcome is worth.

The vehicle: the unit of work

A budget needs something ownable, checkable, and settleable to ride on. That is the unit of work: a definition of done stated before execution, a verifiable result checked by state comparison, a single accountable owner, and a lifecycle of define, budget, execute, verify, settle, all living inside an environment that captures state, meters cost, and writes the record.

The mint rule

u = (S₀, G, B)                  the unit: before-state, weighted checks, budget

Q(u) = V(u) · B(u)              divisible settlement (pay per delivered share)
Q(u) = B(u) · [V(u) ≥ τ]        atomic settlement (all or nothing)

The owner declares the regime at creation: atomic when partial completion is worthless (a half-merged change), divisible when parts carry value alone (four of five report sections). quirqs inherit the budget's currency, so totals compare directly to payroll, vendor spend, and revenue; across companies, every metric is a dimensionless ratio, so the unit travels.

The mint locates each concern where it can be governed: what is it worth is human judgment, priced once, before execution; was it delivered is machine verification, computed from state; what did it cost is metering, complete by construction. No component trusts the worker's testimony, and only the first trusts anyone at all.

How does this compare with every unit software tried before? Next: related units.