open-standards/jouledesk

Joule Desk — The Open, Energy-Accounted Agent Teammate

The agent-teammate shape — a persistent principal you tag in a shared channel to delegate work under scoped access — is the right shape. Joule Desk is the open standard for it, with the three things that shape needs and a closed product cannot give you:

Authority that is a signed, enforced grant — not an admin setting. Work that is energy-metered and attested — not merely reported. And a shared, signed ledger the whole channel can verify — not just watch.

You add @joule to a channel; an admin issues it a grant chain (the tools and data it may touch, and a joule budget). Any member tags it to delegate a task; it decides every action against those grants outside the model, runs the work in an attested sandbox, meters the energy, and seals every decision and completed unit to a ledger anyone can verify — which principal did what, under which capability, at what cost.

Joule Desk is the collaboration/teammate binding of Joule Table (jt.transaction.science); its sibling binding Joule Hook covers coding editors — and Joule Desk's own editor class is Joule Hook. It does not reinvent — it composes the sibling standards: JCP (identity, grants, the shared channel, orchestration), jcp-efficiency (the energy receipt), Sandbox (attested execution), and Joule Hook (when the teammate works in a coding editor). It is one of the Transaction Science open standards.

• Licence: Apache-2.0 for reference code (LICENSE); CC-BY-4.0 for the specification text (LICENSE-SPEC).
• Status: v0.1.0 draft. Specification published (SPEC.md); reference workspace jouledesk-rs/ ships the teammate loop (Teammate + Skill over jcp-orchestrate + jcp-efficiency): grant a skill → tag it → authorise outside the model → seal to a per-receipt-verifiable ledger, with efficiency/1 energy accounting (energy_summary → joules per completed unit, charging waste).

What Joule Desk adds over a closed teammate

Property	Closed teammate	Joule Desk
Authority	admin config, trusted	a signed grant, decided outside the model, enforced
Work integrity	reported	attested (Sandbox)
Energy	none	efficiency/1 — µJ + cost per completed unit + waste
Audit	visible	verifiable — a signed ledger anyone can check
Budget	a quota	a debited, settle-able joule budget
Portability	one product	any surface (chat / forge / editor / api), one standard

Conformance profiles (surfaces)

chat (team chat + mentions) · forge (git issues/PRs) · editor (a coding editor via JouleHook) · api (a service). See SPEC.md §8.

The reference jouledesk-bind binary targets real discrete-message services — Slack, GitHub, GitLab, Discord, Matrix, and a neutral shape — each a thin parse+render pair over one event→tag→reply transform:

echo '{"comment":{"user":{"login":"alice"},"body":"@joule summarize the thread"}}' \
  | jouledesk-bind --surface github
# → {"body":"✅ **@joule** completed it, @alice — decision sealed. _ledger: 1 decisions, all verified…_"}

And a real-time (media) binding class (room, SPEC.md §8.1) for when @joule joins a live voice/video meeting — Zoom, Teams, Meet, or a LiveKit/WebRTC room. The loop is four seams — join under a signed grant, gate each turn outside the model, meter each model call at the model-call boundary, seal one efficiency/1 per session anchored to the room. RealtimeSession (jouledesk-rs) is the reference (target: LiveKit Agents); its meter reuses the same model-call proxy that meters a text session, so the joule ceiling holds whether @joule is typing or talking. examples/room runs a live call — turns gated outside the model, metered at the boundary, and sealed into one verifiable session receipt.

What's here

jouledesk/
├── SPEC.md          — the normative standard (§1–§10)
├── README.md        — this file
├── jouledesk-rs/     — ✅ reference implementation: the teammate loop (Teammate + Skill +
│                      parse_mention/tag_mention for the chat/forge binding, §8) over
│                      jcp-orchestrate. `examples/channel` runs a multiplayer channel;
│                      `examples/vector` regenerates the conformance vector.
└── conformance/v1/  — ✅ a byte-deterministic sealed decision receipt (summarize-allow.hex)
                        + its verified-decode target (receipt.json)

Transaction Science is the steward, not the proprietor: the wire and the right to fork are public.