Glossary
A concise reference of the terms used throughout the OpenFlows documentation.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Agent | An AI worker with a single role in the team (for example, the builder). |
| A2A relay | The internal live task broker used for one job: let the reviewer ask the builder to run a safe command and return evidence. |
| Allowlist | The fixed set of safe commands the relay will run during delegated verification. |
| Coordination store | The shared, durable record of truth that tracks all the team’s state. |
| Controller | The long-lived “brain” that runs the orchestration loop, provisions workspaces, and coordinates the team. It lives in the NEXUS workspace. |
| Control panel / web UI | The operator dashboard for seeing status, editing the team, steering the fleet, and handling escalations. |
| Escalation | A ticket parked because it needs a human decision — security, ambiguity, architecture, or exhausted retries. |
| FORGE | The builder role — writes code against an approved plan, creates branches, and opens pull requests. |
| Human-in-the-loop | The principle that a person stays at the decisions that matter rather than letting the system guess. |
| LORE | The writer role — documents decisions and updates changelogs after a merge, often disabled by default. |
| NEXUS | The orchestrator role — picks up issues, coordinates the team, owns failure recovery, and notifies humans. |
| Plan mode / planning gate | The structural requirement that FORGE writes a plan and halts until SENTINEL approves it before any code is written. |
| Registry (agent team) | The live, control-plane configuration of the team: roles, counts, models, skills, and tools. |
| SENTINEL | The reviewer role — adversarially reviews plans and code for security, quality, and test coverage. |
| SharedStore | Another name for the coordination store. |
| Skill | A packaged, loadable capability a role can use — the configuration-only way to teach an agent something new. |
| Tenant | One team bound to one repository, isolated from other tenants. |
| Ticket | One piece of work, born from an issue, that travels through the lifecycle to merge. |
| VESSEL | The DevOps role — watches continuous integration, resolves conflicts, merges approved pull requests, and tears down workspaces. |
| Worker | An agent slot actively assigned to a ticket, running in its own workspace. |
| Worker slot | A recorded availability slot for a role’s agents, tracked in the coordination store. |
| Workspace | A short-lived, disposable environment where an agent does its work. |
Related
- Roles Reference — the five roles defined in detail.
- Lifecycle States — the phases every ticket travels through.
- Configuration Reference — the knobs you can set on the team.