Agent Time to Action (ATTA)
Agent Time to Action (ATTA) is a proposed benchmark for infrastructure built for machine actors: hand a fresh agent one input — a domain — and measure the walk to one accountable, verifiable action. It counts requests, tokens, human interventions, undocumented assumptions, ambiguous states, host dependencies, time to first success, and the share of the outcome a third party can independently verify. It replaces lines of code, a figure anyone can inflate at will.
Optimise time-to-verifiable-action
Human software optimises time-to-value. Infrastructure for agents should optimise time-to-verifiable-action: how quickly a stranger’s agent can go from a bare domain to a completed, provable interaction. A number you can raise at will is an engineering gate, not a headline — which disqualifies code volume and elevates a measured, honest benchmark.
Questions
Why not measure lines of code or number of features?
Both can be inflated deliberately. ATTA measures an outcome a third party can check, which cannot be gamed by writing more code.
What is the most important ATTA figure?
The percentage of the outcome that is independently verifiable — the share a party trusting neither side could confirm on their own.
Where this lives in the estate
FlashyOS — the thesis that proposes the metric
Keep reading
By Michael Gord · published 2026-09-28 · part of the Agentic Encyclopedia. Dates are the day of publication; events are cited at their own dates.