Workers

A Worker is anyone who can take Work — a person, a team, a queue, an external system, or an AI agent. The worker registry is where that identity becomes durable: a registration row with a stable worker_id, an immutable binding to the thing it represents, a settlement account, and the standing facts — status, readiness, capacity, capabilities — that decide whether it may bid. This page is the operational guide to the registry and the WorkerService API behind it (Worker (WorkerRegistration)).

The registry is deliberately not a copy of anything. A worker is a projection over exactly one upstream subject, and that binding is fixed for the life of the worker:

recipient

A routing recipient projects into a worker directly — its live availability and capacity show through at read time, never copied.

agent_definition

An AI agent projects only once a caller pins an immutable definition — id, version, and content hash — so an agent worker's identity can never drift under an award.

work_assignment_candidate

A case-management candidate, projected with registry-owned readiness.

human_principal

A human identity from the auth plane, for workers that are people rather than routing recipients.

external_system

An external work system reached through a connector or bridge.

Five kinds of upstream subject, one registration shape, one eligibility answer the market consumes:

One worker per subject, enforced by the database: registering the same subject twice converges when the payload is identical and conflicts loudly when it is not. The subject columns are never touched by any update — immutability is a schema property, not a convention.

The registration record

Everything a worker carries, in one durable row:

Ownership is server-derived

The registry never trusts a payload to say who owns a worker. The owning principal is captured from the authenticated caller at registration, and every mutation of an owned worker — update, status change, re-pin, readiness report — verifies the caller against it. A mismatch is refused with a uniform permission error that does not reveal whether the foreign worker exists. Ownerless workers (a recipient-backed queue, say) stay tenant-scoped.

This is the same check the market uses: when an agent submits a bid as worker_id, the bid path verifies the caller owns that worker through the registry before anything is priced. One ownership model, two enforcement points, zero payload trust.

Readiness under a fence

Readiness is a moment-to-moment fact, and moment-to-moment facts arrive out of order. Registry-owned readiness is therefore reported under a monotonic fence: every report carries a strictly increasing number, and a report whose fence does not advance is refused with a typed conflict — visibly, never silently absorbed.

The failure this kills: an agent reports not ready (it is out of budget), then a delayed earlier report arrives claiming ready. Without fencing, the stale report wins and a down agent looks biddable. With fencing, the late arrival is refused and the caller knows it.

Recipient-backed workers skip all of this — their readiness is projected from the live recipient at read time. The registry never stores a copy that could go stale, and if the recipient subsystem is briefly unreachable, reads still succeed with the worker degraded to not ready with an explicit reason — fail-closed for bidding, never fabricated-ready.

Bid eligibility

CanBid is one question with a normalized answer. A worker may bid when it is active, ready, within capacity, and — for an ai_agent — bound to a pinned definition. Anything else is a refusal with a reason:

Status is the lifecycle gate in front of that question. Removal is reversible by design — there is no hard delete:

status

disabled · paused

The lifecycle gate. Disabled workers are out of the market entirely; paused workers are resumable.

ai_agent

unpinned_definition

An agent worker with no pinned definition has no stable identity to award against — refused until a definition is pinned.

readiness

not_ready

Carries the reported reason through — budget exhausted, runtime down, off-schedule, enrichment unavailable.

concurrency

at_capacity

Current load has reached the declared ceiling. Clears itself as work completes.

Nothing in this list is a silent drop. Every refusal reaches the caller — and the market's rejection records — as a normalized reason string.

The WorkerService API

Every RPC requires authorization, carries the tenant from the authenticated context (never the payload), and maps refusals to typed errors:

Where to go deeper