quirq: Measure Agent Work
quirq is the output meter for AI work: verified, owner-valued, delivered. Measure what your agents actually deliver on XO, not just what they cost.
Anyone can launch an agent on XO. Very few can say whether it's working. quirq is the missing output meter: one unit of budget currency of verified, owner-valued, delivered work — minted against captured state, never self-reported.
The token meters the machine side completely: cost, energy, carbon. Nothing meters the work side — outcomes delivered at human-assigned value. That single gap is why AI budgets climb while ROI stays undemonstrable. quirq is the unit that closes it.
The unit in one paragraph
A human owner defines an outcome with a machine-checkable definition of done and budgets it at value B: the price they would pay for the outcome to exist. The task carries B potential quirqs. An environment snapshots the world before execution (S₀) and after (S₁), scores completion V ∈ [0, 1] against the definition of done, and mints V · B quirqs of delivered work, recorded in a tamper-evident ledger with everything production consumed: inference, compute, API calls, storage, and human intervention.
Read the section in order
This is the web version of quirq: A Unit of Work for Intelligence (XO Labs, 2026). The narrative motivation lives in The Future of Work; this section is the canonical treatment, arranged so each part builds on the last.
1. What is quirq
The definition and the mint, the two-meters argument, why the budget is the denominator, and how it compares to every unit before it.
2. How to calculate it
The mechanics: scoring against captured state, the mint rule, the all-in cost model, and worked arithmetic at every step.
3. Measurement and evidence
QER, quirq velocity, intervention rate, trajectories, the energy bridge, methods, validation, and the claim ledger.
4. Real world use cases
Support, legal, reporting, and code as units of work, and the quarterly dashboard a company reads like a P&L.
5. How to integrate this today
Four habits, the adoption path, the practitioner playbook, and the gaming defenses.
Start at the beginning: what is quirq.