Glossary

Orreth speaks a compact vocabulary, and the same word means the same thing on the panel, in the chat, at the doors and in this book. Every definition below is plain, self-contained and under 240 characters — the contract the first architecture’s console held its dictionary to, kept here by hand for the new kernel until it serves a dictionary door of its own.

This book leads with plain engineering terms and shows the machine’s names as labels — “the register of tools and services (the shelf)”. Where a word below is capitalised, that is how the glass writes it.

Term	Meaning
bench	A named effort under your seat in the Studio: the agent's drafts, its step in the making, its experiments, its lives and the hold it waits on, as one row of the ground. It closes when its agent joins or when you let it go.
binding	A JSON file that turns the one workspace-firmware template into a pull's own agent: the prompt, the skills and the tools for the CREW or the MONITOR workspace.
body	Any agent the kernel governs, run as its own process: born from a template, joined through the desk as the same self every life, thinking only through the gateway, serving asks and duties.
cell	One universe's physical home: its own kernel self, database and role, benches and topics, bodies and keys, sealed from every other. Cells are worlds.
conformance fixture	A language-neutral file of cases both kernels must pass unchanged: given this input, expect these bytes, this hash or this refusal by name. Twenty-six of them are the contract between the two kernels.
consequence	How much an act can change: routine runs at once; consequential holds at the interlock for a person's yes; grave asks for the person's authenticator code and a master's click.
craft	A component a body is made of — a template, prompt, skill, policy, graph, binding or golden set — on the shelf by name and version, never a self. A draft is a craft under your seat until the cut.
DID	A self's name on the wire — did:orreth:agent:…, did:orreth:kernel:…, did:orreth:person:… or did:orreth:service:… — derived from its public key or, for a person, from their name.
envelope	The one wire shape every ask, reply, fact and tool call wears: canonical bytes, a content hash, who acted for whom (the authority chain) and why (the marker). The same message is the same bytes everywhere.
epoch	A universe's count of homes: it advances when the universe is re-homed to another cell, and the old home refuses to serve a stale one.
fact	One thing that happened, signed and kept: a body joined, a reply landed, a lever was pulled. Facts carry pointers and hashes on the rails; the words stay on the ground.
firmware	A body with a function and no persona: the planner, critic, grader, MITL, toolkeeper, stablekeeper and the workspace agents. Same laws as a resident; only the face differs.
floor	A level inside a universe on the scope path (u:dev/f:ops), staffed by its own crew; mode tightens down from the universe. Floors hold rooms.
golden set	The cases an engineered agent is born with: an ask and the short words the reply must contain. The Experiment runs the candidate through them in its room.
health check	One sentence that must be true of a world, read from the ground every thirty seconds: every mind answers, the meter and the gateway agree, this cell is sealed, every red is answered…
hop	One step a graph took while serving an ask or a trial case: the node's path, when, how long, whether it ended well, and the hashes of what went in and out. A row on the ground; the canvas plays hops back in order.
intention	A standing purpose with a stop: the kernel watches for what you named, plans the next objective itself, acts, and reports — a consequence still holds for you. The kernel's own five never end.
journey	The soft line under an ask that says where it went, who is fulfilling it and where it was fulfilled — every ask wears one.
keeper	A firmware body that tends a register on a clock — the toolkeeper the shelf, the stablekeeper the Stable — probing, versioning, and proposing a retire or a re-pin for a person to cut.
kernel	The one always-running program (orrethd) that holds what must be rigid for a fleet of agents: identity, memory, the rails, the meter, the gate, the watches and the levers. Policy stays with people.
lease	What an admitted body holds: a token chained to the kernel's root that opens the body's own words at the door and nothing more, for thirty days, with a fuel clause in dollars. A lapsed lease reads dormant.
lever	A governed act the kernel itself can pull through the same door a person would — restart a body, check or restore a service, retire one — declared as data with its consequence and the metrics it remedies.
marker	The typed reason a fact carries — objective, intention, thought, action, observation, improvement… — minted with the fact and linked to its parent, so the lineage of why can be rebuilt from the log.
master	A person whose seat can govern: admit a body, restart a parked one, retire a service, and confirm a grave act for someone else from their own window.
mind	A language model a body may think with, wherever it lives: Anthropic, OpenRouter, Ollama on your machine, or any OpenAI-compatible base. Assigned to a body for all its work or one class of it.
MITL	The Master Mind In The Loop: a firmware body that has read the architecture and the covenant, summoned to say who and what an act touches before you decide.
objective	The kind of ask that moves what you asked for: the planner writes the steps, the crew acts, and every step that would change something holds for your yes.
organ	One of the six parts the kernel always carries and the panel always draws: the DESK, the GROUND, the GATEWAY, the SHELF, the MONITOR and the ANALYZER.
parked	Held with its evidence, never dropped and never looped. A body that died three times in five minutes is parked; a message the rail carried that was never a valid envelope is parked until a person advances past it.
proof	How sure the kernel is of who asked: L1 is the ask itself, L2 is an in-chat confirm, L3 is the authenticator's code and a master's click. The demand rises to meet the consequence.
pull	A workspace that slides in over the glass — CREW or MONITOR today — with its own firmware agent bound to it. Esc puts it back and restores the chat's scope exactly.
put to work	The Studio's one word: the kernel cuts what changed on a bench in order (the prompts a graph names, the graph, the golden set, the template), skips what stands unchanged, and opens the Experiment — one held act, one Yes.
resident	A body with a name and a persona — the librarian, echo — the ones that answer you in the chat.
room	The narrowest level on the scope path (u:dev/f:ops/r:bob). An experiment room is where a candidate's trial life runs; nothing stands there but an arm.
seat	A person's standing at the doors: a capability token the kernel signed after the person proved a code from their authenticator. Every door reads who you are from the seat, never from the page.
self	A body's or the kernel's permanent identity: an Ed25519 keypair whose public half is its DID. The seed stays on disk under the home; a new identity per run is a defect.
session	Your own worldline in the chat: a conversation with its results and artifacts. A new session archives the old one with a short version; nothing is deleted.
station	A crew seat on the panel. Solid means seated by its lease, dashed means declared but not seated, amber means the kernel parked it.
template	A small JSON file that declares a body: its name, nature, persona or function, the graph it runs, the mind it prefers, the tools it may use and the duties it keeps. A body's template hash rides its join.
the Analyzer	The floor hatch of the glass: everything born in the chat grouped by origin — intentions, the objectives under them, in flight and done — read from the ground, never by asking a body.
the brief	One sentence to the workshop agent with the Studio open — make an agent called … that … — from which it opens a bench, drafts every craft and files one held act for your Yes. It never cuts, promotes, seats or answers a hold.
the covenant	The thirteen rules every body wears as a policy sheet and every model coding the kernel holds to; a body without the policy never joins.
the crew	The set of bodies a kernel seats when it lights, declared in one manifest (crew.v0.json): two residents and eight firmware bodies today. Every seat is a process the kernel spawns and governs.
the desk	The join desk: the five-status road a body walks to enter a world — pending, challenged, proved, staged, then done or denied. A proven key still waits for a governing seat's yes unless it is the crew or a returning self.
the digest	The short version of a session, written from the Record alone and citing what it summarizes.
the era	The world's version, one number on three faces: the VERSION file, the kernel crate and the reference package. Both health doors whisper it — 0.1.0 today.
the Experiment	The agent's gate: a candidate cut runs as a trial life in an experiment room through its golden set, four reviewers sign verdicts under their own names, and the verdict is a proposal a person promotes or declines.
the feed	The live stream the glass listens to: a small notice for every fact as it lands (kind, id, reference). The page fetches the record through a door; the browser never touches a broker.
the fuel clause	A body's spending allowance in dollars and the window it renews in, written into its lease and enforced at the gateway. A drained body says so; a refill holds for a person's yes.
the gateway	LiteLLM, run and managed by the kernel: every thought any body has goes through it under the body's own key, and comes back with its cost. Nothing thinks off-meter.
the ground	The kernel's memory: one Postgres database holding every signed record, ask, reply, lease, watch and meter line for a world. One writer ever; nothing is overwritten, corrections sit beside the original.
the guide	What you can say here and what happens: the kernel's own list, served at the /guide door and opened in the glass with “guide”, “help” or “?”.
the harness	The golden cases run against a body's mind on a schedule; a failing run escalates to the chat. From the Rust kernel the run rides the rail to the body.
the honest boundary	The standing register of what is proven, partial or parked, with the evidence named. A claim not on it is a claim Orreth does not make.
the hull	The fixed ring every body runs: hear, recall, route to the chat, work or event edge, then the template's graph as the work node, then the signed reply. The kernel's laws live in the ring, never in an agent's nodes.
the interlock	The hold in the chat where a consequential act waits: Cancel is the default and has the focus, Yes needs a deliberate click, and the act wears proof L2 when it runs.
the kernel map	HOW THE KERNEL WORKS: the kernel's declaration of itself in the one graph model — seven boxes and one ask's road numbered 1 to 7 — served by both kernels with their live numbers and drawn in a window over the Panel.
the kind of an ask	Thought, objective or intention: read from your words and shown as a chip before you send; one click flips it. The kind decides how far the kernel goes without you.
the levels	Universe, floor and room on one scope path served by one kernel per cell; a listing at a level sees everything within it, and where a promoted agent's next life stands is a field of its promotion.
the meter	The ledger of every thought: which body, which mind, how many tokens, what it cost in dollars. A health check holds it to the gateway's own numbers.
the one chat	The single conversation with the whole world: a name at the head sends an ask to one body, a time window scopes it, the kind chip says what it is, and every reply names who served it.
the outbox	A table on the ground where a fact waits, in the same transaction that made it, until a relay publishes it to the rails. A committed record can never lack its event.
the owner	The first person to prove an authenticator on a ground nobody holds. From then on only the owner or a master can enroll another person.
THE PANEL	The glass's main window: the kernel drawn as a control room's panel. Geometry is what is declared, light is what is happening, colour is who did it — amber a person, cyan a body, violet the kernel, red a watch or a hold.
the profile	What this ground knows about you in your own words — name, place, time zone, free claims — labeled by who said it, read first by every body that answers you.
the rails	The paths every message travels: the ground (Postgres), the invocation rail (RabbitMQ) for work someone must claim, and the events rail (Kafka) for facts anyone may replay. Nothing moves off the rails.
the Record	Every word a body or a person put into the world, kept verbatim and forever with its lineage. A correction is a sibling record; a purge is a governed act that leaves only hashes.
the reference	The same kernel written first in Python (orreth_spine). It runs on port 4601, passes the same conformance fixtures as the Rust kernel, and stays the yardstick the Rust kernel is measured against.
the remediation rail	What happens when a watch goes red: the kernel reads a dossier off the ground, the planner names one lever from the catalogue, the kernel pulls it, reads the watch again and says what happened.
the running board	The panel's live tree of work: an intention, the objectives filed under it, the thoughts and actions taken to meet them. Every row opens the Analyzer.
the seam	The one door two cells that name each other speak through, in messages signed by their kernels' own selves. An ask that names a cell routes home and is answered here.
the shelf	The register of every service the kernel governs — tools, MCP servers, stores, sources and minds — on one ladder: registered, versioned, healthy or unhealthy, retired. Retired is rest, never deletion.
the sill	The bar under the panel with its switches: ARCHITECTURE, OPERATIONS and PERFORMANCE layers, FULL SCREEN, the TOUR, and the doors to the chat, the pulls and the Analyzer.
the Stable	The kernel's register of minds (language models): each a stall with a pinned deal — provider, model, price — and an entry in the gateway. The stablekeeper tends it and proposes, never acts alone.
the Studio	The full-screen pull where an agent is made and tried before it is seated: a bench per effort, the true graph inside the hull, one word to put it to work, an agent that makes it all from a brief. THE WORKSHOP until 2026-10-16.
the tape	The panel's newest-first line of facts in words: who asked, who answered, how long it took, which lease lapsed, which lever was pulled and why.
the three edges	The three ways an agent is addressed at the hull's route stage: chat (a human's words), work (a duty or an objective), event (a marker it declared interest in). The journey says which one an ask took.
the three modes	Manual, manual assist and full auto — the human's dial of involvement, read from the kind of the ask. A consequence holds for a person in every mode; the machine never runs alone.
the tour	A soft amber line drawn around one part of the live panel at a time, with a plain-words card beside it: what it is, what to try. Say “tour”, or press the switch on the sill.
the true graph	A compiled LangGraph's own shape, read by the body the first time it runs an import node and recorded on the source's row; the canvas draws it inside the hull's work stage.
thought	The kind of ask that changes nothing: a question, one answer now. You are the whole loop.
tool	Something a body may run: declared as data the kernel reads (name, words, schema, consequence), executed body-side, authorized, journaled and metered by the kernel, which never runs the call itself.
watch	A named alert on one metric: red while its condition (metric, comparison, threshold) holds, green otherwise. A red watch is an observation the kernel's Resiliency intention acts on.