The process
Work advances by acts, and every act leaves something behind. Capture is open to anyone. Of the six acts that follow it, five are Worker acts — each advances the work and produces what the next act needs. Validation is the one exception, held by the persona rather than the Worker, because its object is the outcome and not the work.
| Act | Held by | Leaves behind |
|---|---|---|
| Capture | Anyone | A request |
| Sift | Worker | A typed item, agreed to be done |
| Specify | Worker | Specifications that fail |
| Plan | Worker | An ordered route, and a declared touch |
| Action | Worker | The change, and a result for every criterion |
| Validate | The persona, or a recorded stand-in | A judgement on the outcome |
| Publish | Worker | A delivered result, confirmed — and the state complete |
Verification
Verification is not one of these acts — it is the exit of each of them. Specify, Plan and Action all end with someone who did not do the work confirming what was produced. Validation is the exception, and is a step of its own, because its object is different.
Judging work against what was asked of it. A Verifier act, held by someone who did not do the work, at the exit of every act that produces something — the specifications, the plan, the change.
Two checks, and both must hold. Work that passes one is not verified.
| Check | Asks |
|---|---|
| Conformance | Did the work match what was asked, to standard? |
| Currency | Is what was asked still right, given what changed while the work was in flight? |
Currency is the one almost nobody runs, and it is the one that catches the expensive failures — because work that conforms perfectly to a stale target passes every other gate.
Two outcomes only: it verifies, or it returns the work. A verifier that cannot settle the question from what is in front of it has found the evidence insufficient, which is a failed verification and the Worker's to close. It does not escalate.
The verifier is given everything except the session.
| Must have | Must not have |
|---|---|
| The item · the criteria · the specifications · the plan and what it touches · the change itself · the standards · what else changed while the work was in flight | The session in which the work was done |
An agent reviewing its own output is not independence. The separation has to be real — a different actor, different context, or a deterministic gate. Otherwise what has been automated is self-certification, which is worse than no check because it produces a green tick.
Even with a fresh actor, it has clean context and you do not. You know which part you rushed, and you will steer it without meaning to — through the way the question is asked, through what gets pasted in, through which answer gets accepted quickly.
What runs alongside
Commitment runs alongside these acts, never among them. It is a promise of when the work will arrive — made by a Decider, carried as a property of the item rather than a stage it passes through, and changing nothing about the acts or their order.
Whether the work should still be done at all is not one of these acts either. That is a
Decider question, and it may be asked at any point after the work was accepted: either the
work continues, or what was accepted is withdrawn and the item is Retracted.
Where the work rests between one act and the next is written on the states.