Glossary

This page explains, one at a time, the words you will meet using Builder. Like a bead, it describes Builder as it is designed to work. How Builder works shows how the parts fit together.

adjacency briefing — The short list of nearby work you receive when you check out a work item, naming items close enough to yours that you may be about to duplicate one. It warns and never blocks.

agent — A named role Builder can put to work: a persona, a model and the tools it may use. You ask for an agent by its name, such as a reviewer.

Archives — The part of the Library that holds records of what happened: reviews, comments, records of agent runs, and signals. Each entry is written once and kept for context.

bead — A crew's short description, a few hundred words, of where its project is going: what it is for and how it will work once finished. A crew writes its bead first, with the write-bead skill, and changes it only when the destination changes.

Bosun — The part of Builder that governs agents. It approves each request for an agent, authorizes every action an agent takes, and records what each run cost and whether it worked. What an agent may read or spend is decided in the Library, and the Bosun carries it out. The name comes from the ship's officer who assigns a crew its work.

call slip — A single-use credential the Library issues when a work item is checked out for an agent, naming the work item, the documents that work needs, the model the agent will use and what it may spend. The Materializer trades it once for a library card.

canonical knowledge — What a project holds to be true: its bead, its decisions, how it is built and how to work it. It is kept in the Reference Room, which many systems call the knowledge base, and every change to it is reviewed before it lands.

Chart House — The part of the Library that holds the state of every project: epics, work items, Courses, and who has checked out what. It is the one part of the Library that settles competing claims on the same item.

checkout — How you begin changing anything in the Library. Checking out a document or a work item gives you a lease, so nobody else changes it while you work, and for a work item it also gives you an adjacency briefing. You make the change and return it.

co — Short for crew orchestrator, the session that runs a crew's work. You start one with the co command, which opens it in the crew's directory.

corrections queue — Where work arriving outside the plan goes, such as a defect found along the way or a small fix. Every work item belongs either to an epic or to this queue. Its length measures nothing about progress.

Course — A crew's route from where its project stands to where its bead says it is going: an ordered list of epics. It sets the order and no dates.

crew — One project and everything working on it: a directory, the sessions that work there and the agents they put to work. The steward creates crews with the new-crew skill.

Deck — The desktop application where you pilot each project hands-on. It shows the state of everything in a project as it happens, and it makes it easy to move from one project to another.

definition of done — The checkable conditions that end a piece of work. Every epic and work item carries one, so anyone can tell when it is finished.

epic — A piece of work large enough to plan, carrying a specification and a definition of done. A Course orders epics, and each epic breaks into work items. Checking out any work item under an epic holds the whole epic.

Keel — The engine underneath Builder: the Library and the Bosun together. It shapes how work is done, whether it succeeds and what it costs. It has no screen of its own, and you reach it through Deck and Orient. The name comes from the backbone a ship is built on.

knowledge base — What many systems call a store of canonical knowledge. Builder calls it the Reference Room.

lease — The hold checkout gives you on a document or a work item, which stops anyone else changing it until you finish. A lease on a work item covers its whole epic. It lapses on its own when you stop showing signs of activity.

librarian — The component inside the Library that answers requests and refuses the ones that break a rule, such as a change to an item someone else has checked out.

Library — Where Builder keeps everything a project knows, in three parts: the Reference Room for canonical knowledge, the Chart House for the state of every project, and the Archives for records of what happened. Every change goes through it.

library card — The credential a call slip is traded for, bound to one agent for its working life. The Materializer holds it and makes every Library request for the agent, and the Library can withdraw it at any time.

materialization — Building a runnable agent from a role: a clean place to work, the documents the role needs, and only the powers the role allows. The agent starts with the documents its call slip named already checked out.

Materializer — The component on each machine that puts agents to work for the sessions there. It trades each call slip for a library card, builds the agent's workspace, and makes the agent's Library requests with the card.

memory — Builder's word for any record of what happened; everything else it keeps is canonical knowledge. Most memory goes to the Archives, a good deal is discarded, and memory needed constantly, such as the state of every project, is kept in the Chart House.

Orient — The view of the whole system, less for doing things than for understanding them. You can narrow it to one crew, and the global view is always one step away.

profile — A list of the documents a role should read, kept for each crew. The Library uses it to choose the documents an agent starts with.

Reference Room — The part of the Library that holds canonical knowledge: beads, decision records, architecture and how-to documents. Its documents are files in a git repository, so every change is reviewed as a diff.

run — One agent doing one piece of work from start to finish, with a record of what it did and what it cost.

session — A conversation with Claude in a terminal. The steward is a session, and each crew works through sessions of its own.

signal — An observation worth keeping that is not yet a piece of work, such as a risk noticed in passing. Signals are kept in the Archives, where they can be searched.

skill — A set of instructions a session loads for a particular job. Builder installs three: new-crew and new-subcrew, which create a crew and an extra session within one, and write-bead, which writes a crew's bead.

specification — The description, carried on an epic, of how the project will stand once the epic is done. It describes that end state and leaves history and plans out.

steward — The first session you meet after installing Builder. It owns no project. It asks what you want to build, creates crews, and carries decisions between them. It lives in its own directory, ~/builder/steward by default, and its instructions there are yours to edit.

vault — One of the Library's three parts: the Reference Room, the Chart House or the Archives. Each holds a different kind of thing under its own rules.

waypoint — A point on a Course that marks progress along the route. A waypoint can be the completion of one epic. A synthetic waypoint is reached when a set of epics and corrections are all done, which marks progress that no single piece of work delivers on its own.

work item — A single piece of work with a definition of done and a concrete course of action. Each belongs either to an epic or to the corrections queue.