Every call becomes a receipt
An agent that takes one instruction and operates a business system end-to-end, unattended, is now a shipping product category — not a hypothetical. Nobody reviews what it called, how many times, against which live endpoints, or what it would have cost to reproduce. The black box is Metrecept's answer: every call that crosses the pipe mints a signed, independently verifiable receipt of what happened and what it cost — checkable by anyone with nothing but a public key and the receipt itself.
What a receipt proves
| Kind | Proves |
|---|---|
cache_hit | This exact request was served from replay — zero upstream tokens, signed, not asserted |
api_call | This third-party business-API round trip happened, with a signed fingerprint of the endpoint hit |
session | Everything tagged with one session id — event counts, per-kind totals, total pipe rent — as one signed aggregate |
Same signature, same verification path, regardless of kind — checking it never depends on what the receipt is about. Full field-level reference: Docs — Receipts.
What it doesn't do
Said plainly, the way every doc behind this product says it: a receipt is a flight recorder, not an autopilot. It does not stop an agent from making a bad call, and it does not sit in the critical path deciding what an agent may do. What it guarantees is narrower and realer — that the call survives the session, undisputed. Dispute-proof after the fact, not governed in the moment.
Verify it yourself
No Metrecept account, session, or SDK required — only the receipt and a public key:
python scripts/verify_receipt.py "<X-Ohm-Receipt value>" --base https://api.withohm.dev
The verifier fetches the published key directory, resolves the signing
key by its JWS kid, and checks the Ed25519 signature independently of
Metrecept's own word for it. See it end to end — a multi-step unattended
session and its one aggregated session receipt — in the
Waste demo or scripts/blackbox_demo.py.
Related
- Waste demo — a receipt verified live, in the browser
- Docs — Receipts — full field reference and versioning policy
- The black box at scale — the same mechanism, organization-wide