Outcome Concepts

Rewards & Artifacts

An artifact is the thing shipped; a reward is what it earned.

Artifact

A concrete thing the agent shipped — a post, a page, a release. It moves through open → externalized → closed as it goes from drafted to live to measured.

Reward

A metric snapshot tied to one artifact — what that specific thing earned, on its own cadence.

Don't conflate the two scopes

A reward snapshot is about one artifact. A project-metric snapshot is about the whole loop's north star. They're tracked separately so one loud artifact can't be mistaken for the loop actually improving.