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Glossary

The words Ephyra uses, in plain language, with the name you will see in code where it differs.

Ephyra has a small vocabulary, and a few of its words mean something narrower than they do elsewhere. If a screen or a page uses a term you are not sure of, it is here. Search finds them too.

Words you meet first

Quest One repair, recorded from signal to close. Called a trail in API paths, ref names and JSON.

Signal Something that suggests a problem: an exception, a failing trace, a report. Signals with the same fingerprint are grouped.

Checkpoint A place where a person may be asked. A reviews the hypothesis, B the plan, C the patch and its proof.

Blocking / advisory A blocking checkpoint waits for a person. An advisory one records the question and carries on.

Inbox What is waiting on a person: checkpoints, spend requests, parked quests, questions.

Approver / Viewer An approver can decide checkpoints. A viewer can read everything and decide nothing.

Area A named part of your repository, defined by path globs, with its own risk and autonomy level.

Autonomy level How far Ephyra may go in an area without asking: Watch, Research, Propose, Patch, Auto-land.

Shadow mode Decisions are recorded and nothing advances. The Watch level.

The repair

Hypothesis What research believes is wrong and why. The file hypothesis.md.

Reproduction (repro) A check that fails because of the problem. It must fail before the patch and pass after.

Plan The intended repair. The file plan.md.

Revision A numbered attempt at the fix. A quest that is rolled back, or revised by a person, moves to the next revision.

Head / base The commit of the patch, and the commit it was built on.

Proof bundle The list of evidence for one revision: reproduction, tests, diff scope and whatever the risk requires. Its SHA-256 digest identifies its exact contents.

Bound The revision, head and proof digest a decision applies to. A decision whose bound no longer matches is stale.

Probe A small check run on demand. A regression probe is a past reproduction kept after a clean close. An intent probe checks that the application does what an intent says.

Intent A prose description of what part of the application is supposed to do. Files in intents/.

Risk Low, medium, high or critical. Sets the proof required and limits what may land automatically.

After the fix

Landing Writing the reviewed commit to the repository. A quest ref landing writes a branch (trail_ref); auto-land writes to the base branch.

Watch Observing the deployment for a set window after landing.

Deployment receipt A URL you provide that reports which commit is deployed.

Rollback Undoing a landing after a regression, in a new commit.

States

Parked Stopped with a reason, and resumable.

Handed off A person has claimed the review.

Abandoned Killed or rejected. Final.

Closed Landed, watched, clean. Final.

Under the hood

Journal A quest's history in Git, at refs/ephyra/trails/<id>/journal.

Event A fact about a quest: an agent finished, a person approved, a watch saw a regression.

Effect Something a transition asks to happen. A request, not evidence that it happened.

Operation key (idempotency key) A stable identifier for one side effect, so a repeat is recognized as the same operation.

Operation ledger The durable record of which effects were started and how they ended.

Reconciliation Checking an external system by hand because a write's outcome is unknown.

Projection A copy of quest state in the durable store, kept for fast reads.

Worker lease / fencing One worker owns a workspace at a time; a replaced worker cannot keep acting.

Unverified Tested against a contract or a fake, and not exercised against the live service. Also the error raised when an integration cannot be verified.

Untrusted content Text that came from outside: logs, traces, comments, answers. Always data, never instructions.

People and parts

Persona One of six named roles: Rho listens, Bell researches, Nema proves, Lappet mends, Turri watches, Velum drafts.

Engine The exact backend identity that did a piece of work, as it reported itself.

Run One agent step, with its transcript.

Runner Where an agent's code executes.

Forge Where the repository lives: plain Git over HTTPS, Radicle, Tangled.

Not Organic The identity provider used to sign in, and one source of hosted models.

Velum The persona that helps draft policy in the console's Workspace.

&Tutor An explainer on a quest. It reads the records and cannot act.

Control plane The Ephyra server, as distinct from this documentation site.