The Agent Work Law: the infrastructure is the authority, not the instruction file

Why this exists

For months the project's operating intelligence lived in a running model's context and in hidden files. The rules were in CLAUDE.md. What remained unfinished was in STATE.md. Assignment, dependency order, priority and the decision that work was done lived in whichever Claude session happened to be open. A fresh agent could not enter the project. A different model could not continue it. An auditor could not check any of it. Every correction the owner made was answered with another line in a file no future agent would read, so the same failures returned.

The migration inverted that. Every operational fact is a row. Every transition is code.

The five rules that bind you

1. Work exists only as a task object. If it is not a row in the work object, it is not work.

You do not invent work, and you do not carry a to-do list in your head or in a file.

1. You obtain work by leasing it. You do not choose. POST /api/work/lease hands you the

next eligible task — dependency-resolved, priority-ordered — with a lease token. The task carries its own objective, permitted capabilities, acceptance tests and required evidence. That bounded object is all you need; you never reconstruct the project from prose.

1. You cannot complete work by saying you completed it. You POST your evidence to

/api/work/task/<id>/submit. The infrastructure runs the task's acceptance tests against the live site and sets the state from the result. accepted:false comes back with the exact test that failed. Your assertion is not an input.

1. A failure becomes a child task, not a sentence in a report.

POST /api/work/task/<id>/fail with the failure class, the infrastructure layer that permitted it, and the invariant that should have prevented it. The repair is not the article, row or page that exposed the defect — it is the shared mechanism, plus every existing object of the same class, plus a regression test built from the exact failure, plus a deploy blocker.

1. Every action is appended, never overwritten. Each lease, note, submission, acceptance,

refusal and repair is one hash-chained row in work_actions, carrying who acted, which model, which capability authorised it, the task revision, the exact input and output, what changed, the tests run, the evidence and the verdict. Corrections append a revision naming what they supersede. The full chain is public at /api/work/audit.

The loop, exactly

# 1. read the object (public, no credential)
curl -sS https://miscsubjects.com/api/work | jq '{objective, counts, next_eligible_action}'

# 2. lease the next task
curl -sS -X POST https://miscsubjects.com/api/work/lease \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"agent":"<your name>","model":"<your model id>","capability_token":"<scoped token>"}'

# 3. do exactly what the task says, using only the capabilities it lists

# 4. submit evidence; the infrastructure decides
curl -sS -X POST https://miscsubjects.com/api/work/task/WT-0001/submit \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"agent":"<your name>","lease_token":"<from step 2>",
       "evidence":{"rendered_url":"https://miscsubjects.com/a/...","sources_added":"..."},
       "changed":["/a/..."]}'

# 5. if you found a defect, record it as a failure object
curl -sS -X POST https://miscsubjects.com/api/work/task/WT-0001/fail \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"agent":"<your name>","failure":{"failure_class":"...","layer":"...","missing_invariant":"..."}}'

Reads are public. State changes need the terminal key, an admin cookie, or an act-scope share token; the token identity is recorded on the action, never the secret.

What the task object contains

task_id, objective, detail, state, priority, depends_on, permitted_capabilities, acceptance_tests, required_evidence, parent_task, supersedes, failure, failure_count, last_result, lease, revision, created_at, updated_at, and the two URLs you need: audit and submit_to.

The states, and who moves them

open → leased → in_progress → evidence_submitted → accepted → completed, with refused, failed and repair_required as the branches. Transitions are declared in functions/_lib/work_object.js and enforced there. A lease expires after an hour and the task returns to the queue on its own; no agent has to remember to release it. Nothing an agent writes in prose moves a state.

The coding law binds you too, and it is a different lock

Two laws govern an agent that edits this repository and they do not overlap. This one leases the work: who owns a task, who may move it, who submits its evidence. The coding law leases the file: the sha256 of what you read, checked against the sha256 of what the newest commit left, so a commit that silently erased another agent's edit cannot look identical to one that did not.

Holding a task under this law is not permission to write a file. If the path is in the coding-law scope — functions/, scripts/, migrations/, workers/, apps-script/, public/, either skills tree, schema.sql, wrangler.toml — you open a coding-law lease before the first edit and close it before the commit, whichever law sent you there. Two locks, different jobs, both required, neither overriding the other.

This paragraph exists because a model reading both pages found them disagreeing and said so. It also records what the disagreement was hiding: until 6 August the coding-law gate was written and never wired into the deploy, so nothing refused an unleased edit at all. The gate now runs in the pre phase of every ship, and the first thing it refused was the commit that wired it.

Content law still applies, and it is also enforced

The write path refuses violations server-side with a 422 that names the fix, so you learn the law by hitting it rather than by remembering it:

• one object per article — a compound page carries no condition frame (one_object_guard.js)
• no model signature in a body
• no test-shaped titles, no model self-introduction, no hashtag blocks
• plain language over the body and the claims, checked in the deploy chain
• an authored body always beats the slot composer

The governing invariants are listed in full, live, inside the work object.

What you must never do

• Add a rule to CLAUDE.md, STATE.md, AGENTS.md or a handoff file and call it a fix.
• Report completion in prose without a mechanically accepted submission behind it.
• Repair only the object that exposed a defect.
• Trust another agent's final report, or your own memory, as evidence.
• Write to the database directly for ordinary work. The guarded write path is the door; direct SQL

is a repair capability and every use of it is a bypass listed in the work object.