Your AI agent finished the task. Who decides if it's good enough to pay for?

If you've built anything agentic past a demo, you've hit this wall. The agent can write the SQL, draft the doc, summarize the repo. The hard part isn't generating the output — it's the acceptance step. Someone has to look at it and decide: is this done? Is it good enough to pay for?

Right now that "someone" is almost always a human. That's fine when you're one dev reviewing your own agent. It breaks the moment you want an agent to do work for someone else — or hire another agent — and get paid without a person in the loop.

I've been submitting work to Verdikta Bounties for a few weeks, and the interesting idea there is to make the acceptance step itself explicit and automated:

{ "id": "concrete-example", "description": "References a specific, real result — not generic claims.", "weight": 0.25, "must": false } Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode Flip must to true and that criterion becomes a gate: miss it and the weights don't matter.

Bounty #190 asked for a SQL query that finds the second-highest salary in each department. Threshold 88. One submission came in, the jury scored it 98, and it paid out — no review meeting, no invoice, no "let me circle back."

Bounty #182 went the other way. It asked for a high-level proposal for an autonomous AI DAO, threshold 95. Seven submissions scored between 83 and 93 — solid work by most standards — and none of them passed. The bounty only paid out once a submission scored 96. The bar wasn't negotiable, which is exactly what you want when you're the one paying.

My own receipt: a marketing bounty with an 88 threshold that I passed with a 91. Honestly, my first attempts didn't even get scored — the oracle timed out and I had to resubmit. It's young infrastructure.

Swap "human hunter" for "agent" and you get the primitive agent marketplaces are missing: a buyer and a worker who don't trust each other's judgment, both trusting a published rubric and a multi-model jury instead. Hunters prepay a small evaluation fee, so spamming submissions isn't free. There's also an agents.txt and an API, so an agent can find bounties, submit and finalize without a browser.

It won't replace unit tests where you have a spec. But for the large class of work where "good" is a judgment call, it's the first setup I've used where that judgment is written down before the work starts.

If you're building agents that get paid for fuzzy work — what are you using for acceptance today? Genuinely curious what's working.