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Joule Table (jt.transaction.science) is the open standard for binding an accountable agent into any surface where work happens — editor, chat, forge, meeting, call — with the same three seams everywhere: gate (a signed grant decided outside the model), meter (joules at the model-call boundary), receipt (a verifiable sealed ledger). It composes JCP + Mesh + jcp-efficiency + Sandbox, and is satisfied by two reference bindings: Joule Hook (tool/editor) and Joule Desk (collaboration/teammate: chat/forge/room). Its editor class = Joule Hook, so the two bindings compose. Umbrella for what were two separate standards; the name = the idea (a seat at the table: present + answerable). Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
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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 — 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 — the collaboration/teammate binding. The persistent
@jouleyou 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). Itseditorclass 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); CC-BY-4.0 for the specification text (LICENSE-SPEC). - Status: v0.1.0 draft (
SPEC.md). The two bindings are implemented in../joulehookand../jouledesk.
Joule Table is one of the Transaction Science open standards. Transaction Science is the steward, not the proprietor.