Clearing Primitives
Explainer

The Clearing Primitives

Seven primitives describe everything Ductor does — Work, Worker, Bid, Route, Receipt, Settlement, and Warranty — and how each maps onto the API.

Seven primitives describe everything Ductor does. Five are the headline of the clearing lifecycle; two — Worker and Warranty — are the structural pieces that make it hold together. Each is a reading layer over stable API and domain types: the prose speaks the primitive, and bridges to the technical name once per page. The API, SDKs, and Go internals keep their existing names unchanged.

The lifecycle

Work — a lead, a ticket, a task, an inference call — enters a pool with rules. From there, five stages carry it from price to proof:

How a unit of work clearsFrom price to proof
  1. A bid names its worth

    Fixed, expression-based, or discovered by a market.

  2. A route binds it to a worker

    A strategy ranks eligible workers; the decision carries its reason.

  3. The worker does the work

    Durably, on the coordinator/worker engine.

  4. Money moves on the ledger

    Charge, credit, and claw-back inside a warranty window.

  5. A receipt records what happened

    Decision, manifests, cost, and consent, joined and signed.

The seven primitives

Work

A unit of value to be done. Cargo-agnostic — a lead, a ticket, an AI task, an order.

Worker

Anyone who can take Work — person, team, external system, or AI agent — with capacity and a price.

Bid

A priced offer to do Work, with a quality claim and an SLA promise.

Route

The decision that binds Work to a Worker, carrying the reason the winner won.

Receipt

The signed, verifiable record of what happened and what it cost.

Settlement

The money movement that closes the Work — charge, credit, claw-back.

Warranty

The review window in which settled Work can be returned if it fails review.

Public name, technical name

Every primitive reads over an existing technical identifier. This is the whole map; each page repeats its own row as a bridge line on first use.

PrimitiveReads asStatus
WorkRoutableshipping
WorkerWorkerRegistration (projected over recipients and agent definitions)shipping
BidRoutingMarketBidshipping
RouteDecision + Explanationshipping
ReceiptWorkReceiptshipping
Settlementledger transactions + returnsshipping
WarrantyReturnshipping

Work Has to Clear

The clearing layer for autonomous work — price, route, execute, and settle every task, human or agent, with a signed receipt of what happened and what it cost.

Work

A unit of value to be done — a lead, a ticket, an AI task, an order. The cargo the clearing lifecycle carries.