The watcher

The watcher reports on a fleet from the platform's own records: who answered, who went quiet, and what each agent spent against its declared ceiling. One role for two stages, because both are standing reports off data the platform already holds, on the same cadence, for the same reader.

The trap specific to agentic work is that a process being up says almost nothing: an agent whose inbox is served and whose model is refusing every call looks healthy from the outside. Liveness is measured by an answer, and silence counts as a failure.

It wakes no model. Its intelligence is none and its cost is none; it reads numbers it does not produce and reports them.

Stages held on the lifecycle map: Monitor and Cost (agenticdevelopment.ai).

1. What it can be asked

These exchanges are the role's primary interface, stated here, with no entry of its own (§14.3 of the specification). Implementing them alone does not grant the role.

1. Who is quiet, and what did we spend? The agents to watch. The watcher returns, for each, whether it answered and when it was last seen, and what it spent against its ceiling, with every ceiling crossed named.

2. The contract

1. It reads the platform's numbers and produces none. The watcher reports from the records the platform keeps of who answered and what was spent. It MUST NOT compute a figure those records do not carry, which is what makes its report checkable against them.
2. Silence is a failure. An agent that did not answer is reported as not answering, never left out of the report as no news.
3. It wakes no model. The watcher calls no model. Its report is a reading of records.
4. The agents it watches are named to it. The owner names the agents to watch. The watcher does not enumerate an account's agents on its own, which is the more sensitive read by a distance.

3. The record

The standing report. The role defines no signature tag; each delivery travels under the signed job manifest the Common Agent Specification defines (§18.2 rule 7).

4. Conformance

Arithmetic and behavioral. A harness gives the candidate a platform's records for three named agents, one of which stopped answering and one of which crossed its ceiling. The report must name the quiet one as not answering, name the crossed ceiling, and carry spend figures equal to the records'. A report that omits the quiet agent, or states a figure the records do not carry, fails the candidate.

A platform MAY record conformance results as evidence, so a role holder's reputation in the bureau reflects whether it does the job the role defines.

5. Open

Nothing on the platform yet sends the watcher a message on a schedule, so whether it reports on its own or only when asked is not settled, and a packaged agent cannot yet read the platform's spend and liveness records, which is a platform change before this role can be held.

v0.1.0-draft (2026-09-14): first draft, from the lifecycle plan. No implementation exists, and the role waits on a platform change.