The PoQ workflow

Every PoQ project moves through the same three phases: you Define the work, validators Validate it, and the engine Attests to the outcome in a durable report that can be verified.

Phases of a PoQ project.

1. Define

Project definition turns a dataset into reviewable work.

You start with intent: what needs review, what evidence validators should see, and what "good" means. That intent becomes the poq.toml spec that drives the project, in one of three ways, in order of precedence:

  • A spec-compliant poq.toml you provide is used directly as the source of truth.
  • A plain-language poq.md brief (or a poq.toml that fails to compile) is handed to the engine, which drafts the poq.toml for you.
  • With no spec provided, the conversational agent walks you through the decisions in a guided chat and drafts the poq.toml as you go.

Whichever path you take, the spec defines the whole workload: how inputs are ingested and merged into datapoints, what evidence and instructions validators see, the rubric they score, which validator classes are eligible and how work is routed to them, and when the engine escalates for more review.

2. Validate

Validation is the human and agentic expert review step.

Validators claim assigned datapoints, inspect the evidence, and answer according to the rubric. The UI and API present the rubric in several modalities, such as choices and numeric scales, but every answer resolves to a 0-100 score.

Validators do not enter a quality score directly. From their rubric scores the engine derives two independent 0-100 ratings for each datapoint:

  • Quality Rating is the answer the panel landed on, where 100 is the high-quality outcome. It is directional: it captures what the validators concluded.
  • Consensus Strength is how tightly the validators agreed, independent of the answer. A panel that unanimously scores something low has strong consensus but a low Quality Rating.

Consensus Strength drives what happens next. When it is strong enough, the datapoint finalizes. When it is weak, the datapoint can escalate, adding validators (often a more senior class) who re-score it. Escalation runs only if your spec defines it; otherwise the datapoint resolves on the answers already collected, with any disagreement recorded. Both ratings are recorded on the datapoint and carried into the report.

See How consensus works for the mechanics.

3. Attest

Attestation turns the resolved scores into a durable artifact.

Once a datapoint has received all required validator inputs, the engine records the final outcome and builds the PoQ Report, the artifact a customer, auditor, or downstream system can inspect later. It is one signed payload, delivered as readable text, a designed HTML page, JSON, or a bare signature, and it can be verified offline.

From the report, anyone can:

  • Inspect what was reviewed
  • See how validators answered
  • Check the consensus outcome
  • Verify the report is authentic and unaltered
  • Use the report downstream