WRFI
The open standard for handing off AI work
Handoff — protocol 1.2.0, live & probe-tested · Discovery — v1.0 draft · spec (CC-BY-4.0)
A WRFI handoff is a durable, versioned object that lets unfinished AI work wait for its next participant — another session, another vendor's tool, or a human — without re-explaining everything. WRFI transports work-in-progress, not merely content. The standard has two layers and a deliberately tiny core.
Two layers
WRFI Handoff
The portable continuation object and its lifecycle: what a handoff contains, how it is versioned, and how participants coordinate around it safely. This is the layer that makes work continuable.
WRFI Discovery
How an AI-capable web page declares machine-readable actions — endpoints, schemas, auth, risks — so an agent with nothing but web access can find and use them. This is the layer that makes the handoff reachable with zero configuration.
Discovery teaches an agent how to reach a service; Handoff defines what it exchanges once there. A conforming implementation can adopt either layer or both.
The core is small on purpose
A useful independent implementation of the Handoff core should be buildable in a weekend. It requires only:
- a stable URL identity for the handoff object;
- the content itself;
- the task layer — objective, requested action, status, handoff message;
- a monotonic version;
- a machine-readable handoff view (context, history, update paths in one fetch);
- update preconditions — no silent overwrites, conflicts fail loudly.
Everything else is an extension, not an obligation: append streams, review/acceptance loops, workspace manifests (portable environments), provenance metadata, federation, and claims. wr.fi implements the core plus these extensions; a conforming implementation does not have to.
Conformance, not ownership
A WRFI implementation isn't compatible because it says so — it runs the conformance suite. Every guarantee the standard makes maps to an executable probe, and wr.fi/conformance shows the live results against this deployment, re-verified continuously. The suite is open and runnable against any implementation: matrix-probe.mjs <your-url>.
Standard, service, implementations
| WRFI | The neutral specification (CC-BY-4.0). Small core, clean extensions. |
| wr.fi | The hosted reference service, run by Kurikkai Oy. |
| wrfi-cli / wrfi-mcp | Reference clients (MIT), at github.com/wrfi. |
| wrify | The server reference implementation (AGPL-3.0) — designed for self-hosting and federation; public source release in progress. |
Compatibility is determined by conformance, not by who runs the server. The “wr.fi”/“WRFI” marks are reserved; the standard is not.
Discovery in practice
Honest assessment: no single instruction method reliably reaches every AI tool today, so Discovery is specified as layered redundancy — the agent hits whichever layer it understands first.
| Method | Works? | How an agent finds it |
|---|---|---|
| /.well-known/wrfi | Yes | Canonical bootstrap: protocol version + surface map |
| /llms.txt | Yes | <link rel="alternate"> or direct URL |
| Visible page content | Yes | Agent reads the page as text — most reliable layer |
| Self-documenting API | Yes | GET on the endpoint returns schema + examples |
| Content negotiation | Yes | Non-browser user agents get JSON/text |
| OpenAPI | Sometimes | Some tools fetch specs |
| <meta name="ai:instructions"> | Emerging | In <head>, always server-rendered |
| <script type="text/wrfi-instructions"> | Future | Structured block for native tooling support |
wr.fi serves all of these simultaneously from one source of truth. Full layer definitions and the script-tag format are in the Discovery spec.
WRFI vs OpenAPI vs MCP
| WRFI | OpenAPI | MCP | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Carries | Work-in-progress | API shape | Live tools |
| Setup | Zero | Spec file | Server + config |
| Both sides online? | Never required | N/A | Yes |
| Best for | Continuing unfinished work | Full APIs | Agent tools |
They complement each other — a handoff can even declare the MCP servers its work needs.
WRFI is an open standard (CC-BY-4.0), served canonically from this site: Handoff protocol · Discovery layer · Live conformance · hello@wr.fi