Work, Return, Verification, Acceptance
Why completion is a sequence of distinct durable events
A serious system must preserve these distinctions.
Work Order
The authorized request: objective, exact inputs, constraints, tools, budget, evidence, and failure behavior.
Execution
The worker attempts the Work Order.
Return
What came back: outputs, logs, costs, limitations, failures, and worker-claimed status.
Evidence
Exact artifacts that support a claim: tests, digests, screenshots, source spans, logs, measurements.
Verification
An independent check of the Return against the Work Order and evidence contract.
Acceptance
The authorized human or policy decision to adopt, revise, or reject the result.
Receipt
The durable record of the exact transition.
The laws are:
Completed is not accepted.
Return is not verification.
Verification is not acceptance.
Deployment is not production seal.
A worker may complete execution and return a failed test. That is a valid Return and a failed Work Order result. A verifier may pass the artifact while the human rejects it for purpose or quality. Acceptance remains human-only where the contract requires it.
The interface must show these states independently. Collapsing them creates false completion.
Source register
- N05-S01 — Glyph Desk Master Specification.
GLYPH-DESK-MASTER-SPEC.v1.md - N05-S02 — Native Accepted Act directives.
Pasted text.txt - N05-S03 — Haygent Specification.
HAYGENT-SPEC-v1.0.md