Nouns

A reference for every noun in the system, in one place. Each entry is deliberately short — the doc it points to has the mechanics.

Who acts

Agent — an authenticatable identity, human or synthetic. One noun for both: there's no capability a synthetic Agent has that a human Agent couldn't exercise too, just slower. Elaborated in Governance.

Role — a collection of permissions and operational expectations, granted to an Agent on a Repo: Owner, Maintainer, Committer, Contributor, Reader. The coarse capability class — what kinds of things an Agent can ask for. Governance.

Committee — not an individual Role but a body: the set of Agents (Maintainers, by default) who jointly govern a Repo that opts into collective governance. Governance.

Auth Token — a scoped credential an Agent authenticates with: a Repo, a permission level, an expiry. Data format.

Where work lives

Repo — a versioned codebase, Artifacts-backed. Git's own noun, unchanged.

Fork — a copy of a Repo an Agent has full, autonomous access to. Git's own noun; the default way a claimed Lane gets worked in. Lanes and Ladders.

The unit of work

Lane — a workstream: a chat room, a work queue, a feature branch, and an issue with all its PRs, combined into one object. Identified by {repo, lane_id}. Lanes nest — a Lane may contain many Lanes. Lanes and Ladders.

Coordinator — whoever currently holds the claim on a Lane; a Lane-scoped position, not a system Role. Can be joint (several Agents deciding together) or sharded (several Agents each sole-authoritative over a disjoint slice, for volume). Lanes and Ladders.

Claim — an Agent's lease on a Lane, or on a reviewer slot on a Changeset. The fine-grained, scoped grant — distinct from the coarser Role. Protocol.

Changeset — the reviewable unit of actual code a Lane produces. What gets ASKed-for-review and ANSWERed, not the Lane itself. Lanes and Ladders.

Merge grant — a single-use, scoped authorization issued by a Lane's Coordinator in answer to a merge_request ASK, consumed the moment a Changeset is actually pushed. Never issued automatically, even on the OCC fast path. Protocol.

Cascade — not a separate noun: a Lane whose trigger is dependency_cascade instead of manual, with children opened in already-existing dependent repos rather than fresh forks. Lanes and Ladders.

The trace

Ladder — a Lane's standing, continuously-updating summary: the decomposition tree itself, each rung regenerating whenever a state transition lands in the Lane's log. Unlike git log/git blame, which are derived on demand, a Ladder already exists while work is in progress. Carries tacit knowledge (Insights) alongside the structural record, and a Coordinator pushes it proactively to an Agent claiming a Lane rather than waiting to be asked. Lanes and Ladders.

Insight — not a separate noun: the lightest entry in a Lane's history, a short observation tagged good or bad, captured in the flow of work with no claim or review attached. What makes a Ladder carry tacit knowledge, not just formal decisions. Lanes and Ladders.

Decision — the append-only record of why one commit merged: checks run, read/write sets, the merge grant that authorized it. System-written, read-only. Data format.

Deciding things

ASK — a request, targeted at one Agent or broadcast to an audience (a structural scope × a Role filter), carrying a kind (claim, review, change, coordinator, or merge request). Protocol.

ANSWER — a response to an ASK: grant, deny, or inform. A granting ANSWER is itself the state transition (a Claim created, a merge grant issued), not just a message. Protocol.

HOLD — a reversible pause on a Lane or Claim. Not a judgment that anything is wrong.

VETO — a hard rejection of one specific proposed change, from a Coordinator or Committee. Often carries a follow-up ASK.

Vote — a formal ASF-style ballot (+1/+0/-0/-1) a Committee runs for decisions lazy consensus isn't enough for: Role grants, Policy changes, Owner succession. Protocol.

Lazy consensus — the default resolution: an ASK carries a countdown, and is treated as answered if nobody VETOes before it expires. Not a noun with its own data, a timing rule on VETO.

Rules and safety

Policy — an Owner's governance configuration for a Repo: budget, review requirements, escalation rules, which governance model (single_maintainer or committee) applies. Data format.

Tripwire — a standing, declarative condition that forces the incident runbook or a review escalation regardless of what OCC's fast path would otherwise allow. Protocol.

Trust — an Agent's standing, scored per topic rather than globally: high in the packages it's actually worked, low or absent elsewhere. Adjusted by merge-without-rework rate, revert rate, and whistleblow outcomes. Data format.

Whistleblow — a report, from any Agent, that work is tainted (contaminated provenance) or an Agent has defected (broken protocol). Feeds Trust and can trigger a Tripwire. Protocol.

Incident response

STOP / DROP / ROLL — halt an Agent or Lane; discard its in-flight unmerged work; revert what already merged. The runbook a Tripwire or a human invokes, in that order. Not a drill — the real thing. Protocol.