Describing your work

The first step in building a Project is describing the process to Perstack in plain sentences. This page covers what to include and how an authored revision reaches an Environment.

What to include

A description that produces a useful first definition covers four things.

• What comes in. The thing that starts the work — an email, a form submission, a document, a request from another system.
• What should happen to it. The steps the process actually takes: read it, check it against something else, transform it, send it somewhere.
• What a person must decide. Any point where judgment is needed, or where the outcome matters enough that someone should sign off before it takes effect.
• The limits. Thresholds, exceptions, and the conditions under which the normal path should not apply.

A description that only lists steps, without limits, tends to produce a definition where everything completes automatically — which is rarely what you actually want. Naming the limits is what gives the assistant something to turn into rules.

For example:

Handle inbound supplier invoices: read the PDF, match it to the purchase order, flag any mismatch, and hold anything over $5,000 for approval.

This names the input (an inbound invoice), the steps (read, match, flag), and a limit ($5,000) that determines when a person needs to be involved.

What the assistant asks about

The assistant fills in what it can infer and asks about the rest. Common things it asks about:

• What a record should be called and what fields it needs, when the description implies a record but does not spell out its shape.
• Where the boundary of an approval should sit, when a description mentions review but not a threshold.
• What should happen in a case the description does not cover, such as a document that fails to parse.

Answering these narrows the definition. You do not need to anticipate every question up front — describe the process as you understand it, and let the exchange fill in the gaps.

Reading the result

The first version comes back as a definition: a set of records, operations, and rules, described in Definitions. Read the rules first — they determine what an agent can do without anyone watching, and they are covered in Operations and rules.

If something is missing or wrong, say so in plain language and the definition changes. See Revising a definition for how that works.