Unit of work
The contract that replaces the prompt: a job with a definition of done, a budget, and a single owner, living in a workspace.
Phase 1 said businesses hire agents and pay for outcomes. This page defines the thing they actually hand over: not a prompt, a job.
A prompt is a single instruction with no memory, no files, no tools, no budget, and no record once the reply scrolls away. Whatever an agent does in response is unowned and unverifiable, and every serious deficiency of prompt-driven work traces back to that statelessness. A unit of work is the opposite: a job that is owned from start to finish, executed, checked, and paid for. None of that fits in an instruction; it fits in a workspace.
- One instruction
- No memory or state
- No tools or files
- Nothing to verify or bill
- Owns the whole outcome
- Memory and files persist
- Tools to reach your systems
- Budget, state, and record built in
What the job needs to live
The lifecycle
What the contract buys you
A definition of done forces the requester to say what correct looks like before execution, which is where most delegation failures are created. Verification by state comparison is robust in a way that reading the agent's self-report is not. A budget makes the gap between value and spend a clean per-outcome signal. And one owner per unit means that when something ships broken there is exactly one place to look, the property that lets a business extend trust to a non-human worker at all.
There is a subtler reason the unit is built this way, borrowed from optimization theory: any proxy placed under pressure gets gamed (Goodhart's law), and activity metrics (messages sent, tokens generated, hours logged) are proxies an agent optimizes effortlessly. A verified state change is the hardest-to-game measure available, because it is the outcome itself.
The loop a business already runs
Businesses do not think in models, agents, or tokens, and should not have to: nobody prices an accountant by spreadsheet keystrokes. The loop they run is intent, action, impact, and the unit of work maps onto it one-to-one. The model, the agent, and the tokens disappear inside the action step as swappable implementation details, which is what lets an agent's unit of work sit in the same queue, carry the same kind of budget, and be judged by the same check as work done by people.
The contract defines and verifies the job. What it does not do, by itself, is give the delivered work a unit of account. Next: the quirq, the unit minted when this lifecycle completes.