The words we use.

The agents & the ring

• Cardinal — the web application: the human's window onto the engagement, and the name of the whole system.
• Peer ring — the small set of long-lived AI agents that run an engagement together, each owning one job.
• Chief of Staff (CoS) — the broad-and-shallow agent that metabolises the signal storm into a brief, an outbound queue, and a watch-list.
• Solution Architect (SA) — the deep-and-narrow agent that authors and ratifies architecture decisions.
• Steward — the custodian of the audit trail: verifies the chain, attests every shipped change, watches the other agents.
• Library Curator — a planned agent that synthesises reusable patterns across engagements.
• Operator — the human lead who runs the system and makes the load-bearing decisions. Not an agent.
• Project Shepherd — a liaison role that translates engagement state for the human Project Manager.
• Meeting Notes Specialist — an on-demand role that turns meeting input into a structured four-section record.
• Scout — a narrow, read-only reader that watches one kind of source and drops a summary into the signal inbox.

The mechanism

• Ticker — the always-on session that fires the recurring routines on a schedule while the machine is awake.
• Ring-tick — the bundled recurring routine: a frequent core tick (housekeeping) plus a periodic scout sweep.
• Core tick — the frequent half of ring-tick: drain queues, group and classify, roll up cost, raise alarms.
• Scout sweep — the periodic half of ring-tick that runs the scouts to harvest new signal.
• Lease — a single-flight lock that ensures only one holder runs a given step at a time; released in a guaranteed cleanup.
• Message bus — the local, database-backed channel agents use to hand work to each other, with wake-on-message.
• Watermark / cursor — a scout's bookmark of the last item it processed, so it resumes after a sleep rather than re-reading or skipping.
• Cadence — whether and how often the recurring routines run; an operator-controlled posture, not an automatic default.

Artifacts & records

• Brief — the twice-daily summary the Chief of Staff produces, in a 5-3-2-1 shape: five risks, three decisions, two customer signals, one fire.
• Decision — a recorded choice with a lifecycle (proposed through ratified); engagement decisions and technical decisions have different owners.
• ADR — an Architecture Decision Record: a decision about the system's design, moved through review and compliance gates before it is ratified.
• Risk — a tracked risk, issue, or blocker, with a severity and an owner.
• Publication — an approved artifact dispatched to one or more destinations; always triggered by a human pressing Publish.
• Audit spine — the append-only, hash-chained ledger of everything that happened; the system's tamper-evident memory.
• Attestation — the Steward's signed confirmation that a shipped change is what it claims to be, recorded on the spine.

Configuration & setup

• Skill — a Markdown-defined capability an agent can run, with triggers, inputs, outputs, and a return contract.
• Role brief — the document that defines an agent: its mission, mode, what it may read and write, when it escalates, and its hard limits.
• Workflow — a configuration that declares which roles exist, which model each runs, and which to spawn at startup.
• Engagement pack — the per-engagement configuration overlay: the customer-specific values that layer over the engagement-agnostic base.
• Corpus — the collection of skills, role briefs, workflows, and packs that lives under the operator's home directory and mirrors to cloud storage.
• Bootstrap — the ceremony that validates the configuration and spawns the agent ring.
• Mobilise — the ceremony that onboards a new engagement, provisioning its database schema, roles, and secrets.
• Three greens — the gate that requires all of a secret scan, a kernel-purity scan, and a config validator to pass.

Plumbing & data

• System of record — the database that holds the authoritative state; if a fact isn't there, it isn't true.
• Stored procedure (SP) — the only way data is written: a procedure that checks the actor, makes the write idempotent, and appends an audit row.
• Write-path — the SP-mediated route every write takes; the same for agents and for the app.
• Base tables vs. views — base tables hold the data; "how we count tables" means base tables only, excluding views and other derived objects.
• Data API Builder (DAB) — the bridge that exposes the database's write-path to agents through a standard tool interface.
• MCP server — a tool server the agents use to reach a system (the database, the work-item tracker, and others) through a standard protocol.
• Managed identity — the keyless way the app and agents authenticate to Azure: a directory-bound identity and a short-lived token, never a stored password.
• Sensitivity label — a classification on a document that controls who may read its contents.

See these terms in action → · Meet the agents →