Work
Who promised what, what is waiting, and who is needed now.
(01) Coordinate
Work coordinates work shared between people, AI agents, systems and machines. It records who promised what to whom, who acts on whose behalf, what each piece of work is waiting on and which decision falls to whom, and it brings each person only the items that need them. Work coordinates; the work itself is done by people and agents.
(02) The question
“Who promised what to whom, what is waiting on what, and whose attention is needed now?”
(03) Principles
- 01
Commitments, not just tasks
Someone requests, someone promises, someone delivers and someone accepts. Saying “done” is not the same as acceptance.
- 02
Only what needs you
Needs Attention shows only the items that need you, why now, and what happens if you wait. Briefing shows what changed while you were away.
- 03
People and agents together
Hand work to agents, watch progress live and step in. Every piece of work has one accountable owner and one driver at a time.
- 04
Honest controls
Stop, take over and change are offered only where the agent or system doing the work actually supports them.
- 05
A record you can trust
Every change is a signed record, and the state of work is computed from those records rather than edited by hand.
(04) Capabilities
Commitments
- Request, promise, decline and counter-offer
- Conditional promises
- Declare done, then accept or reject
- Two-person acceptance
- Sub-commitments with risk roll-up
- Budgets, deadlines and regular updates
Attention
- Needs Attention
- Briefing
- My Work
- Waits that say who or what, why and until when
- Escalation through Relay
- Muting that never stops the clock
Control
- Accountable owner and single driver
- Take control and give back with a handoff note
- Stop now, finish safely or pause
- Automatic, intervened and manual modes
- Proceed, notify, require a decision or deny
- Queues and pools
Decisions
- Decision, acceptance and plan approval gates
- All, any, K-of-N and sequential approvals
- Live presence and control handoff
- Approvals never inferred from chat
- Authority checked by Access
Trust
- Signed, append-only records
- Offline verification
- Evidence and provenance
- Export and replay
- Work across organizations
- Crypto-shredding for personal data
Extend
- Practices: templates for each industry
- REST API
- CloudEvents and signed webhooks
- Importers for existing tools
- Web app and mobile app with offline queue
(05) Agent-native
Give work to agents and receive work from them over open protocols. Work never runs the agent; it keeps the commitment, the waits and the decisions honest.
- Assign work to agents across machines
- A2A client and server
- MCP tools scoped to the caller's authority
- Controls offered only when the agent supports them
- Heartbeats and progress reports
- No agent can answer a human decision
(06) Standards and protocols
- A2A
- MCP
- CloudEvents
- REST
- OpenAPI
- W3C Trace Context
(07) At a glance
- For
- Teams coordinating people, agents, systems and machines
- Built with
- Rust, with one core shared by server, web and mobile
- Clients
- Web app and mobile app
- Records
- Signed and verifiable offline
(08) Works with
(09) Questions
What is suiss Work?
A work coordination system for people and AI agents. It tracks commitments, what each piece of work is waiting on and whose decision or attention is needed.
Does Work run AI agents?
No. Agents run wherever they run. Work assigns them work, follows their progress and offers controls like stop or take over when the agent supports them.
How is a commitment different from a task?
A commitment has a requester and a promiser. It is finished when the requester accepts the delivery, not when the doer says it is done.
Is Work available?
Work is in development.