Found Work
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A category of incidentally discovered tasks or issues that an agent encounters during its primary work, stored in a dedicated folder within a Ticket-based workspace system to be addressed separately rather than inline.
Role in Workspace Organization
In the context of designing persistent agent workspaces, "found work" refers to additional tasks or problems that surface while an agent is executing its main objective — work that wasn't part of the original assignment but shouldn't be ignored. Rather than handling such discoveries ad hoc or abandoning them, the workspace architecture includes a dedicated folder to capture them for later processing. As described in To Give an Agent a Workspace: Laying a Foundation for Messy Forever Work, "we have a special folder for that called found work".
Significance
The concept reflects a key design principle for long-running ("forever") agent work: agents operating in messy, real-world environments will routinely surface issues beyond their immediate scope. Without a structured mechanism to capture this discovered work, it is either lost or causes agents to derail from their primary task. The found work folder provides a lightweight queuing mechanism — formalizing the separation between doing current work and recording newly identified work — which is essential for maintaining focus and auditability in persistent agent systems.