# Joule Table — A Metered, Gated, Attested Agent at Every Surface

*Home: `jt.transaction.science`*

An agent's accountability shouldn't stop at the edge of one tool. Joule Table is the open
standard for **binding an accountable agent into any surface where work happens** — a
coding editor, a chat channel, a git forge, a video meeting, a phone call. Wherever the
agent shows up, the same three things hold:

> **Its authority is a signed grant decided outside the model. Its work is
> energy-metered. Every action seals to a verifiable receipt.**

The name is the idea: the agent takes a **seat at the table** — present where the work is,
and answerable for what it does there.

Joule Table doesn't re-implement — it **composes** the sibling standards (**JCP** grants,
**Mesh** metering, **`jcp-efficiency`** receipts, **Sandbox** attestation) into one
contract, satisfied by two reference bindings:

- **[Joule Hook](../joulehook)** — the **tool/editor** binding. Carries the gate + meter +
  receipt into a coding editor's own extension points (Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf,
  Antigravity, Zed) — no fork required.
- **[Joule Desk](../jouledesk)** — the **collaboration/teammate** binding. The persistent
  `@joule` you delegate to on a shared surface, whose every action seals to a ledger the
  channel can verify. Classes: `chat` (Slack/Discord/Matrix), `forge` (GitHub/GitLab),
  `room` (Zoom/Teams/Meet/LiveKit). Its `editor` class **is** Joule Hook.

## The three seams

| Seam | What it guarantees | Composed from |
|---|---|---|
| **Gate** | each action decided **outside the model** against a signed capability + joule-budget grant | JCP |
| **Meter** | joules at the **model-call boundary**, honest provenance, never overclaimed | Mesh · `jcp-efficiency` |
| **Receipt** | every allow/deny/unit sealed, **verifiable** by anyone with the steward key | `jcp-receipt` · `jcp-efficiency` |

## The map

```
                    Joule Table  ·  jt.transaction.science
              (gate · meter · receipt — at every surface)
                              │
          ┌───────────────────┴───────────────────┐
     Joule Hook                                Joule Desk
  tool / editor binding              collaboration / teammate binding
  Claude Code · Cursor ·             chat · forge · room
  Windsurf · Antigravity · Zed       (Slack · GitHub · Zoom · LiveKit · …)
          └────────── editor class = Joule Hook ──────────┘
```

- **Licence:** Apache-2.0 for reference code ([`LICENSE`](LICENSE)); CC-BY-4.0 for the
  specification text ([`LICENSE-SPEC`](LICENSE-SPEC)).
- **Status:** v0.1.0 draft ([`SPEC.md`](SPEC.md)). The two bindings are implemented in
  [`../joulehook`](../joulehook) and [`../jouledesk`](../jouledesk).

Joule Table is one of the [Transaction Science open standards](../README.md).
Transaction Science is the steward, not the proprietor.