Outcomes

Outcomes are guided workflows that turn a goal into a finished document. Where a conversation ends with an answer, an Outcome ends with a deliverable. This page describes the intent and the current state of the feature.

Early development

Outcomes are in early development and are not yet alpha quality. The workflow exists end-to-end only in a preliminary form: expect rough edges, changing behaviour, and limited pack availability. This page documents the direction rather than a finished feature, and it will be rewritten as Outcomes mature.

What an Outcome is

A conversation is open-ended: you ask, Varen answers, and the thread grows. An Outcome has a defined destination — a specific document to be completed. Rather than a free conversation, an Outcome workflow leads you through the information needed to produce that document: Varen asks the questions, you provide the answers, and the workflow tracks what is still missing until the document is complete. A tax preparation pack, an onboarding record, an incident report — each is a defined artefact with a known structure and a completion condition.

The structure for each Outcome comes from a ledger pack: a published definition of the document to produce, the sections it contains, the questions that fill each section, and the condition that marks the work done. Packs are curated and published separately from the platform itself, so the catalogue can grow without a software update.

Current state

  • Outcome workspaces can be created where the pack catalogue is reachable; creating one binds it to a specific ledger pack.
  • The guided interview flow works section by section, with the document building as you answer.
  • The pack catalogue is minimal. Packs covering sensitive material are not currently served.
  • Coverage checking — the workflow's measure of what the document still needs — depends on service configuration and may be unavailable.

If you try Outcomes during this period, treat the results as drafts to review, not finished professional documents. Feedback on where the flow helps and where it gets in the way is genuinely useful at this stage — hello@varen.au.

Reference applications

For exercising the bring-your-own-form flow, two fixture bundles mirror the internal reference packs. Each archive contains the same form rendered in four formats — HTML, DOCX, text-layer PDF, and (for the first) AcroForm PDF — plus an EXPECTATIONS.md describing which ledger constructs the derive pipeline is expected to extract. They exist so a derivation run has a deterministic input to compare against.