Overview

The four artifacts

A deployment holds four kinds of document. Each has one author and one purpose.

Artifact	Written by	Declares
Workfile	a workflow author	what should be done, as an ordered list of steps
Connector manifest	a connector author	one integration: its actions, its triggers, and their operational behavior
Schema overlay	a connection owner	the tenant-defined fields of one connection
Filter package manifest	a package author	a namespaced set of pure filters, with fixtures

A Workfile names a connector and an action. It does not declare either. The manifest declares the argument schema, the error classification, the retry policy, and the idempotency promise. An operational detail therefore belongs to whoever knows the dependency, and not to whoever writes the workflow.

A catalog publishes and versions manifests. This standard defines the manifest format. Beyond the standard library and its canonical namespaces, it defines no connector and no action.

What a run does

A run passes through five stages.

1. Resolution. The implementation pins connector versions, filter package versions, overlays, template content, and the callee of every call.
2. Validation. The implementation checks the document against the resolved manifests, and rejects it before any action executes.
3. Execution. Steps execute in list order. Each step reaches exactly one outcome.
4. Recording. The implementation records every invocation, every decision, and every outcome.
5. Replay. The record reproduces the run exactly, without contacting a dependency and without reading a clock.

Expressions are pure and total, so stage 5 follows from stage 4. A run can suspend for weeks and resume.