open-standards/jouletable

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 @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); CC-BY-4.0 for the specification text (LICENSE-SPEC).
• Status: v0.1.0 draft (SPEC.md). The two bindings are implemented in ../joulehook and ../jouledesk.

Joule Table is one of the Transaction Science open standards. Transaction Science is the steward, not the proprietor.