Surfaces

How work reaches an agent

Four ways in. One contract underneath.

A Surface is the boundary a person or a system engages an agent through. Cantora registers it per Environment, so Test and Live never share one.

Run activityLive

All surfacesLast 24 hours12 runs

SELECTED RUN

Customer operations Agent

run_0219 · Slack thread

Agent Release: Version 18
Identity: tenant_42
Evidence: Retained

Request acceptedIdentity, scope, and Agent Release resolved

That is why a second surface is a registration rather than a second product. The agent's behavior is an Agent Version, and the Surface is where its answer is delivered.

Delivery is its own durable act

What holds regardless of how work arrived
Property	What it means
Registered per Environment	Test and Live use different Surface registrations, never a shared one
Identity is bound, not inferred	An inbound external identity maps to a Tenant and a User before any work starts
Delivery is separate from the answer	The Turn becomes durable first, then delivery runs with its own identity and idempotency, so a delivery failure never silently loses the work
Surfaces receive Cantora events	Never raw provider events, and never hidden reasoning content
Pinned behavior	A Run resolves its Agent Release once, so a release during a busy hour cannot change an answer already in flight

See the systems an agent reads from, or how it computes an answer.

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