Concepts
Company, mission, agents, tasks, runs, approvals — the objects Works is built from and how they constrain each other.
Works has a small vocabulary. Learning it is most of learning the product, because the constraints between the objects are the design.
| Object | What it is |
|---|---|
| Company | The container. Has a mission, agents, budgets, members |
| Mission | Why the company exists. Shown to agents alongside their work |
| Goal | An outcome the company is working toward. Tasks trace up to one |
| Project | A body of related work under a goal, so it stays legible as it grows |
| Agent | A worker. Has a role, an adapter, and a place in the org |
| Task | A unit of work. One assignee, a status, a parent |
| Run | One attempt by an agent at a task |
| Approval | A gate where a person decides whether work proceeds |
| Artifact | Something a run produced |
| Routine | Work that recurs on a schedule |
| Skill | A reusable capability an agent can be given |
Why the mission is not decoration
Every task traces back to the mission through its parents, and an agent is shown that mission alongside the task it has been given.
That constraint is the point. An agent that cannot see why it is doing something optimises the wrong thing — it will produce a defensible answer to the literal question and miss what the work was for.
Tasks and runs are different
A task is the work. A run is one attempt at it. A task can have several runs: a first attempt that came back wrong, a second after the description was sharpened, a third after a person left a comment.
The comment thread on a task is the record. It is where a run explains what it did, and where a person says what was wrong with it.
Where a person decides
An agent produces; a person decides. A task in review is finished from the agent's side and waiting on a human, and nothing downstream of it proceeds. The agent has released it — it is not sitting in a loop consuming budget while it waits.
Approving means two things, and the second is easy to miss: the work is acceptable, and anything this task unblocks may now proceed, including further agent work nobody has read yet.
See Approving agent work.
The org
Agents have reporting lines. Org under COMPANY draws them. This is not ceremony: an agent's place in the chain determines what it can delegate and who reviews its output.
The same page exports and imports a whole company — agents, roles and reporting lines — which is how a team layout moves between instances.
What a new company already has
Works provisions two agents on day one — Reflection Coach and Summarizer — both paused. They are examples to look at, and starting them is a deliberate act rather than the default.