showwork 0.1.0

Falsifiable claims and deterministic verification for AI agents. Make your agents show their work.

showwork

Make your AI agents show their work.

Observability tools log what an agent did. showwork verifies what an agent claimed it did — deterministically, against reality — and refuses to bless a "done" that isn't real.

Zero dependencies. Stdlib only. One append-only ledger.

Read the portable spec-v0.1 ledger specification or install the Claude Code Stop-hook adapter.

The problem

An agent reports "done: I updated the config, logged the decision, and moved the task file." Two of those three things never happened. Your logs show the agent ran. Your traces show what tools it called. Nothing checks whether the outcome it asserted is true.

That gap is why agent pilots die before production, and it's what audit-trail requirements (EU AI Act, HIPAA, SOC 2) actually ask for: not "what did the agent do," but "prove the record is faithful."

The model

1. Claims are falsifiable or they're just prose. When an agent (or its harness) reports a completed change, it appends a structured claim to the ledger: a file changed, a path moved, a metric holds, a command passes. Free-form prose is recorded but never counted as proof.
2. Verification is deterministic. showwork verify re-checks every claim against the filesystem and locked commands. No LLM judges an LLM.
3. The exit gate refuses false dones. showwork finish --status ok verifies the session's own claims first. If any is RED, the close is refused (exit 2). Fix it, retract it, or close as blocked — the bypass is stamped on the record either way.
4. The ledger is append-only. Corrections are retraction records that reference the original claim. History is never rewritten.

Quickstart

pip install showwork

# an agent session starts
showwork start --session deploy-fix --agent claude-code

# the agent claims what it did, with a check that can fail
showwork claim --session deploy-fix \
  --claim "bumped the API timeout in config" \
  --type file_contains --path config/api.yaml --pattern "timeout: 30"

showwork claim --session deploy-fix \
  --claim "tests pass" \
  --type command --command-arg python --command-arg scripts/run_tests.py

# the close is gated: exit 0 only if every claim verifies
showwork finish --session deploy-fix --status ok

claims: GREEN (2/2 verified)
session.finish recorded: deploy-fix

If a claim doesn't hold:

claims: RED (1/2 verified)
REFUSED: a clean close requires this session's claims to verify.

Audit any day or any session after the fact:

showwork verify --date 2026-07-09        # exit 0 GREEN, 3 YELLOW, 2 RED
showwork verify --session deploy-fix --json

Check types

type	asserts
file_exists	a file is present
file_contains	a regex matches (or is absent from) a file
path_moved	source is gone, destination exists
frontmatter	a YAML frontmatter field equals a value
glob_count	a glob's match count satisfies == >= <= > <
command	a locked command exits as expected (python <script under project root> only — no shell, no metacharacters, no escape)

Vacuous checks are rejected, not blessed: a regex that matches the empty string, or a glob count that's always true (>= 0), returns an error instead of a pass. A checker that lets an agent record a bogus "done" is worse than no checker.

Python API

from showwork import record_claim, verify_session, resolve_root

root = resolve_root()
record_claim(root, session="nightly", claim="report written",
             check={"type": "file_exists", "path": "reports/2026-07-09.md"})
state = verify_session(root=root, session="nightly")
assert state["verdict"] == "GREEN"

Provenance

This isn't a spec written on a whiteboard. It's extracted from the verification layer that runs a real one-person, AI-operated company. The system began after one agent confidently reported three completed actions and two were not real. The resulting production ledger now supplies the receipts behind the package.

Read the sanitized case study and reproduce its aggregate metrics.

The sanitized snapshot contains 2,158 claims from 842 sessions. Deterministic checks back 2,152 claims. The ledger preserves 152 retractions and surfaced one malformed line instead of dropping it. Its captured audit was RED at 54/60 verified, because failed proof remains visible rather than becoming a green marketing number.

What showwork is not

• Not observability. Traces show what happened; showwork proves what was claimed to have happened.
• Not agent testing. Test frameworks check behavior pre-deployment; showwork verifies outcomes at runtime, every session.
• Not an LLM judge. Every check is deterministic and reproducible — which is what makes the record audit-grade.

Roadmap

• More coding-agent adapters
• Event stream + point-in-time replay
• More check types (HTTP probe, git state)

License

MIT