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Work Plane

The Work Plane receives, represents, and tracks work delegated to agents. It is not a chat model and it does not execute agents directly. Questions, tasks, missions, document processing, conversations, and long-running activities are all represented by the generic WorkItem aggregate.

The Work Plane is where users and systems delegate work to agents, track its lifecycle, interact with ongoing executions, and retrieve results.

Ownership​

The Work Plane owns the functional request, status, requester identity, correlation identifier, interactions, history, result, error, and optimistic version. The Runtime Plane owns agent selection, instantiation, model/tool calls, orchestration, and technical execution.

A WorkItem may optionally hold a lightweight FlowReference selecting an exact published version or the active version. It never embeds a Flow definition. Runtime resolution and FlowRun execution are deferred to the Flow Runtime increment.

Agentstration.Work has no dependency on Runtime implementations, Microsoft Agent Framework, an AI provider, EF Core, or ASP.NET Core. It exposes IWorkExecutionGateway; Agentstration.Runtime.Local implements this port for standalone mode. Agentstration.Work.Storage.Sqlite persists Work snapshots in its own logical store and indexed table.

Lifecycle​

Pending -> Queued -> Running -> Completed
                        |  \-> Failed
                        |  \-> WaitingForInput -> Running
                        \----> WaitingForApproval -> Running or Failed

Any non-terminal state -> Cancelled

Transitions are methods on WorkItem; callers cannot assign Status. Each Runtime event has a stable EventId. Reapplying an event returns without changing the version, history, interactions, or result.

Public API​

The canonical collection is /api/work/workitems:

POST /api/work/workitems
GET  /api/work/workitems
GET  /api/work/workitems/{workItemId}
POST /api/work/workitems/{workItemId}/cancel
POST /api/work/workitems/{workItemId}/messages
POST /api/work/workitems/{workItemId}/input
POST /api/work/workitems/{workItemId}/approval
GET  /api/work/workitems/{workItemId}/events
GET  /api/work/workitems/{workItemId}/result

Responses use transport contracts rather than domain or EF entities. Entity responses expose an ETag based on the functional version. Mutations accept If-Match. Collection queries are bounded to 200 records and support status, type, requester, agent, creation period, sorting, and offset pagination.

Standalone adapter and limits​

The local gateway uses a bounded in-memory queue. After the Queued snapshot is durable, a hosted worker invokes the existing Runtime Plane and converts its outcome into WorkExecutionStarted and WorkExecutionCompleted or WorkExecutionFailed events. This adapter is deliberately minimal and will be replaced or complemented by durable Runtime integration.

Current limits include no restart recovery for queued dispatches, no propagation of cancellation to a running agent, no retry/relaunch operation, no external artifact/blob implementation, and no requester authorization. Technical exception details are persisted internally in WorkError.TechnicalDetails but are not included in public API error contracts.

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