Authority
The principal sets direction and bounds. Managers coordinate, operators perform sanctioned mutations, and workers execute only within delegated scope.
Mission
Keep a human in control of agent work.
AI agents produce useful work, but their own reports do not establish correctness or completion. WorkMan keeps a human principal in control while bounded workbenches separate coordination, execution, and independent proof — even when sessions or tools fail.
- Bounded work
- Every effort has a named scope, owner, evidence path, and stopping condition.
- Evidence over narrative
- Progress, integration, completion, and cleanup are tracked as separate, verifiable claims.
- Recoverable operations
- Partial results are recorded and resumed rather than hidden behind a success flag.
Implemented foundation
What exists today.
WorkMan separates authority, planning, execution, proof, and projection so no display or running agent can substitute for the system of record. These layers are in active use; finality and recovery transaction boundaries are still being hardened.
Policy & decisions
Planning
The trunk is durable planning truth — benches, tracks, records, dependencies. The queue is the candidate lifecycle: recorded, reviewed, approved, packaged, activated into a live bench.
Execution
A local-first workbench binds a Git branch, worktree, staged brief, tmux runtime, and adapter-backed agent seats.
Proof
Gates, receipts, two-seat review, ref finality, cleanup, and rest establish what actually completed.
Projection
CLI, console, generated documents, and this static site expose selected read-only views.
Development trunk
Building one clean cycle, from start to rest.
Current work hardens the four failure modes below before ordinary unattended cycling begins. The runtime stays supervised until the full proof sequence holds.
Phase
Core runtime hardening
Unattended operation
Gated on the safety floor
Target
One supervised clean cycle
Projection built
See snapshot stamps below
Current safety floor
Atomic activation
Admission, materialization, runtime start, and physical-running truth must succeed or recover as one operation.
Durable action evidence
Every external effect needs an attempt record, exact result, read-back, and resumable unresolved state.
Ledger parity
Todo and event state must use explicit roots, fail-closed locks, resolvable owners, and matching provenance.
Pure observation and global rest
Status and readiness checks must not modify state, and shutdown must leave a verified, fully cleaned baseline.
Proof sequence
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Now
Contain and encode
Preserve current evidence, correct the owner graph, and keep capacity at zero.
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Next
Land the safety floor
Repair activation, action evidence, ledgers, gates, finality, cleanup, and rest.
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Proof
Run isolated lifecycles
A negative path must refuse without mutation; a legal path must return to rest.
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Canary
Supervised ordinary cycle
Routine capacity increases only after a supervised cycle completes cleanly.
Repository projection
Published record of completed work
Static public exports, not live runtime telemetry.
A curated selection of completed work, not an exhaustive record.
- Public evidence pending.
Snapshot timestamp pending.
Planning footprint
Static queue snapshot
Aggregate counts only. Individual candidate details are never published.
Queue snapshot pending.
Snapshot timestamp pending.
Longer direction
Toward a smaller, self-contained core.
After a supervised cycle runs clean, planned research will test order-of-magnitude reductions in context, mutation surface, and repeated guidance across language-neutral implementations while preserving critical interfaces and one source of truth. It is not active development.
Access
What is available today.
WorkMan is in private early development: there is no public download, sign-up, issue tracker, or repository access. The protected console admits only recognized accounts through its identity gate.