Glossary · Our vocabulary
Manifest
Our name for the machine-callable declaration a form publishes alongside its human interface — one definition, two surfaces.
A term we coined, not an industry standard. See the whole glossary.
Definition
A machine-readable declaration of a form — its fields, types, requirements and validation — published from the same definition that renders the human interface, and callable by an agent directly.
Lowercase, “handshake” survives as the verb: did it come through the handshake? The capability is Manifest; the thing an agent does with it is shake hands.
Why it matters
Because publishing from one definition is what makes Origin possible. If the human form and the machine surface were built separately, the agent path would be a second integration nobody maintains, and the distinction between them would be an inference. From one definition it is a fact about which door the submission came through.
It also fixes the thing that makes agent traffic indistinguishable today. An agent that can call a tool has no reason to drive a form — see WebMCP for where the standards work is going.
In practice
The design commitment is that the two surfaces cannot drift, because there is only one of them. A field added to the form appears in the Manifest; validation is the same validation; a required field is required on both paths. Any architecture where the machine surface is generated separately reintroduces the drift it was meant to remove.
The common mistake
Reading it as an anti-bot feature.
It does not block anything and it is not a defense. Publishing a callable surface does not stop a script driving your form; it makes the difference between the two observable, which is a different and smaller claim.
If your problem is volume arriving at the door, the honest answers are in the anti-spam set, and the two that work best are not ours. Manifest matters after that, when the traffic you accepted contains both people and agents and you would like to know which is which.
Related terms
- OriginOurs
- Our name for the provenance stamp on every submission: Human, Agent, or Unverified.
- WebMCP
- A proposed browser standard letting a page offer tools an agent can call, instead of an agent pretending to be a person with a mouse.
- VerdictOurs
- Our name for the outcome written back onto a submission: Won, Lost, Disqualified, or Awaiting verdict — plus a value.