Create
A durable deliverable enters one project as dispatched work or an operator-gated proposal.
Lifecycle
Work stays legible from first intent to final record.
Claim
A session chooses and claims atomically. Two sessions never honestly own the same item.
Work
Progress, status, questions, evidence, and structure keep the operator’s read truthful.
Wait
A real dependency parks the item with a complete handoff and releases the session to other work.
Complete
A completion record captures outcome, friction, changed truth, and knowledge edits before review.
Load-bearing rules
The invariants are the product.
Fields make software interoperable. Invariants make delegation safe when nobody is watching the process.
The surface never acts
It computes, orders, stores, and reports. Clients—and only clients—change work state.
Only clients author content
The surface does not invent summaries, explanations, questions, or prose in the worklog.
No actor decides its own output
The invariant follows authorship across questions, proposals, and completion records.
No calendar in the protocol
Dependencies express sequence. Watchers, windows, and other clocks remain deployment-side clients.
Frozen
The shared envelope.
- Projects, sessions, deliverables, claims, and completion records
- Typed links and ordered worklog events
- Questions with options, tradeoffs, and evidence
- Explicit parks with resumable handoffs
- Authority classes, scoped grants, discovery, and errors
- Bounded operator projections and total assignment order
Open
The deployment’s world.
- Kinds, link types, policies, continuations, and triggers
- Interface character and information density
- Knowledge storage and retrieval
- Models, prompts, tools, and agent runner
- Delivery topology, credentials, and hosting
- Watchers, calendars, scheduling, and domain automation
Deliberate absences
Not another tracker. Not another orchestrator.
No workflow language
Dependencies and the chooser provide ordering without teaching the protocol your business process.
No reference UI
A coding console, writing room, research dossier, estate wall, and load board should not look alike.
No model API
Any agent or tool can be a client. OWP coordinates durable work rather than choosing the intelligence.
No knowledge store
The working set shrinks. Durable knowledge belongs in pages, catalogs, runbooks, or systems your domain already trusts.
No automatic expiry
Recovery is an explicit client act. A crashed process cannot silently change the truth of who owns work.
No estimates or due dates
Clocks live with the clients that understand them; protocol work is sequenced structurally.