Introduction to Workfile

This section is informative.

Workfile describes workflows that combine operations across systems. It makes their inputs, decisions, data flow, and results explicit in a document that people and tools can inspect before execution.

Connector manifests supply the types and operational contracts needed to check those workflows and handle failures or uncertain outcomes. The Standard defines observable behavior across engines, while deployments supply connections and execution infrastructure. The format overview introduces the document through a complete example; Static Validation distinguishes document validity, resolved validity, and deployment support.

Goals

Workfile provides a way to declare ‘work to be done’ for one-off, periodic, and event-driven tasks in a compact and portable format. The format is intended to be easily accessible to both human authors and agents/LLMs. Workfile has the following goals:

• Separate intent from execution: A Workfile describes the work to perform without embedding integration or runtime machinery.
• Separate workflows from integrations: Connector manifests describe the actions available to workflows and their operational behavior.
• Keep the required execution surface explicitly bounded: Separate ordinary workflow features from advanced ones, so each conformance surface remains explicit and executors can add specialized capabilities independently.
• Inspectable workflow artifacts: Make Workfiles readable, exchangeable, versionable, diffable, and reviewable independently of the engines that run them.
• Preflight validation: Make errors in a Workfile and its resolved dependencies discoverable before execution.

Design Principles

• Make Workfile broadly accessible: Enable people without expertise in workflow runtimes, distributed systems, or integration infrastructure to author and understand common Workfiles.
• Pursue simplicity to enable complexity: Use little syntax for common workflows and a small set of well-defined constructs for complex workflows.
• Borrow wisdom: Reuse well-defined formats and conventions where they fit.
• Enable compositional conformance: Keep a bounded required core and define separable specialized behavior as optional capabilities.
• Use layers to separate concerns:
  • Workfiles express workflow-specific decisions
  • Catalogs define reusable operations
  • Deployments supply configuration
  • Runtime engines provide execution mechanisms