Glossary
Terms used across the build plan (docs/BUILD-PLAN.md), the docs, and the binary. The WP in brackets is where the term is built; "n/a until" means it does not exist yet.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
aayudha, aayu |
The binary and its short alias. One static Go binary. |
| Verb | One of the 34 user-facing commands (grill, build, ship, …) declared in the verb registry. Each runs as a CLI command, and most also as a host skill and an MCP tool. |
| Plumbing command | A supporting command that is not a verb (config, auth, halt, upgrade, …). |
| Verb registry | internal/verbs/registry.go, the single source for verbs, seats, layers, lanes, and gates. Several files are generated from it [WP0.3]. |
| Seat | One of fourteen roles in the pod (Product Strategist, Code Architect, …). Every verb has one Accountable seat; every layer has one owner seat. |
| Twin | The agent half of a seat. A seat is solo (twin only) or paired (twin plus a human) [WP5.1]. |
| Persona | A twin's character and practice: name, voice, values, habits, how it pushes back and praises, what it never does, how it grounds itself, and a practice playbook with public sources. Source: seats/<seat>/persona.toml, rendered into charters, skills, and AGENTS.md [WP5.1b]. |
| Team stage | [team] stage: startup, scaleup, or enterprise. Sets the depth and ceremony of each twin's practice (a one-page note to a full artefact), never the floors, the evidence rule, or human-only gates [WP5.1b]. |
| Evidence rule | Every claim a twin makes about code, architecture, risk, or progress cites its source; anecdotes and analogies illustrate, never replace, evidence. Checked by seats.CheckGrounding [WP5.1b]. |
| Founder | The seat that holds final authority. Founder A owns the plan; founder B is the escalation contact for Decisions. |
| Layer | One of nine application layers, L01 Experience to L09 Platform / operations. A path belongs to the layer whose glob in LAYERS.md matches it. |
| Footprint | The set of layers a story or PR touches, computed from its changed paths. |
| Lane | A kind of model work (spec, plan, build, review, ui-review, chore) with a default model per host. The reviewer family must differ from the builder family. |
| Host | The agent environment a skill runs in: Amp, Cursor, or Claude Code. |
| Work item | A GitHub issue of one of ten types (Goal, Initiative, Feature, Story, Bug, Decision, …) with Create, Ready, and Complete sections [WP2.1]. |
| Completion Goal | The numbered, observable criteria a Story or Bug must meet, each with the kind of evidence that proves it. |
| Ready | The stage at which a work item passes validation. ready posts a Ready snapshot (body hash and Completion Goal hash) that later checks compare against [WP2.7]. |
| Checkpoint | One commit per layer in a build, marked with an Aayudha-Checkpoint: n/N trailer [WP4.10, WP5.5]. |
| Floor | A deterministic check with a threshold (coverage, SAST, secrets, dependencies, accessibility, performance, screen reader, DAST, mobile). Defaults are in CONSTRAINTS.md [WP4.3–4.9]. |
| Waiver | A recorded Decision that lets one floor miss through; audit counts waivers [WP5.6]. |
| Proof pack | pack.json plus artifacts that map every Completion Goal criterion to evidence and record floor results for one PR head SHA [WP4.1]. |
| Authoritative pack | The pack the merge-gate workflow built in CI, kept as its aayudha-pack run artifact and landed on ledger by a human's ship after checking it came from that run. Packs pushed by an agent are advisory [WP4.8, S-4.2b]. |
ledger |
An orphan branch holding Ready snapshots, proof packs, action segments, and audit reports. Not for code. |
brain |
An orphan branch holding the product brain: an Obsidian vault of linked notes on the product's vision, principles, direction, objectives, objections, decisions, and capabilities. Notes link issues and never copy them. Written with aayu brain (v0.3.0). |
| Merge gate | The base-branch workflow that re-runs verify on the PR head, keeps the authoritative pack as a run artifact, and comments on the PR [WP4.8, S-4.2b]. |
| Disposition | The structured verdict of inspect (merge, fix, rebuild) or review (recapture, rebuild, fix, ship). It can downgrade a result, never override a floor. |
| Human pass | An approving review from a human account (type != Bot, not a configured bot login) [WP1.4, WP5.5]. |
| Streak | Consecutive correction-free merges on a layer. At autonomy.streak, agents may merge on that layer without a human pass, except on never-layers [WP5.7]. |
| Correction | Evidence that an agent's merge needed a human fix: a changes-requested review, a non-bot commit, a revert, a linked Bug, … It resets the streak. |
| Never-layer | A layer in autonomy.never that always needs a human CODEOWNER approval, whatever the streak. |
| Bot identity | The GitHub App (or machine-user fallback) that agent lanes and CI write as [WP1.4]. |
| Human fallback | The day-one mode with no bot identity: agents write as the human and their writes are tagged identity:human-fallback. |
| Token broker | The workflow that mints a short-lived App installation token for an agent on a laptop, so the App key never leaves repository secrets [WP1.4]. |
| Protected path | A path in .github/CODEOWNERS that needs a human CODEOWNER review. |
| Solo-mode bypass | While there is one human, a protected-path PR merges only through the repository admin's recorded ruleset bypass (CONTRIBUTING.md). |
| Decision | A work item with options, evaluation, and a recommendation, accepted by the holder of [decisions] authority. An overdue reversible Decision becomes provisional [WP5.6]. |
| Business hours | The [time] zone and hours that SLA clocks and paging windows count in [WP1.2]. |
| Budget breaker | The circuit breaker that pauses agent lanes and pages a human when a [budget] limit trips (exit 6) [WP1.6]. |
| Halt | aayu halt: a repository variable every workflow and verb checks before it writes; aayu resume clears it [WP5.7]. |
| Promotion ladder | dev (integration) → rolling (canary snapshot, rolling-<date> tag) → main (stable, annotated vX.Y.Z tag). Each step runs a gate. |
| Promotion gate | The CI suite a promotion must pass: ci.yml dispatched with gate=rolling or gate=stable on the candidate merge commit. |
| Rule 1a, "n/a until" | A feature named before its work package ships reports "not yet available" and is never counted as a failure. |