Concepts

The library's nouns. Each term is defined once and used with exactly this meaning everywhere — skills, rules, contracts, tickets, logs.

Structure

tier: One of four layers: T0 contracts, T1 skills, T2 standards, T3 workflows. T0 is the only data interface between them.
contract: A T0 file defining a pure data shape; its generated table renders from contracts/shapes.json.
waist: The T0 layer as a whole — the one narrow interface many hosts sit below and many standards and workflows sit above.
skill: One callable package: a directory whose SKILL.md states a contract in Require / procedure / Never / Return anatomy.
body: A skill's procedure text — the always-paid part of its SKILL.md, budgeted by the token-economy rule.
surface: A text a reader loads automatically, never fetched on demand: the host block, AGENTS.md, a role agent file, a kernel body.
kernel: The primitive skills under skills/kernel/; a kernel skill calls no skill.
workflow skill: An assembled T1 skill calling primitives or other skills; always domain-blind. Lives under skills/workflows/.
callable: One of the two T1 kernel skills — orch-do and orch-judge — that do all real work. Each is invoked through one minting command.
frame: One workflow invocation's durable stack frame: the ticket carrying frame: true that tickets.py frame-open opens. It binds no executor and stamps no standard.
journal: A frame's ## Report: the driver's working memory, appended one line per wave and re-read before each wave.
typed artifact line: The one machine line a callable's child prints for its result, artifact: <kind>:<identity>; a parent relays it verbatim — paraphrase is the failure it exists to prevent.
checker: orch-judge: the profile-neutral callable rendering findings or verdicts over fixed artifacts, never a deliverable.
standard: A T2 item of pure prose stating what a good artifact carries in one domain. It states knowledge, never control flow.
root: A standard naming no narrows:. It introduces its domain.
narrowing: A standard naming exactly one other in narrows: — how specificity cascades (three-js narrows javascript narrows code).
workflow: A skill whose prose calls callables or other skills. Order, parallelism, branches, and bounded rounds are that prose — there is no engine beneath it.
glue workflow: The workflow written for one job, composing reusable workflows, callables and plain sentences, invoked by nothing else.
ring: One of four fixed lookup roots — project, home, imports, lib — a custom skill, standard or workflow resolves through; nearest ring wins on a same name.
bundle: One ring's directory tree of items: the unit imports.lock pins and the trust ledger grants or refuses by content digest.
trust ledger: ~/.orchflows/trust.json, outside every repository so a repo can never grant itself trust.
call edge: A resolved backticked skill name in a skill body; the call graph is acyclic.

Work

run: One physical execution of a workflow against one spec; owns a run id, a worklog, and a ticket directory.
spec: A run's frozen statement, carried by its root ticket; a planning orch-do is its only editor, at intake.
domain: The deliverable's kind — code, content, research, design, data — selecting applicable standards and review lenses.
work item / ticket: A sealed Goal, Context, optional Details, lifecycle, and graph position. The two words name the same thing; ticket is the on-disk view.
atom: A work item at the finest lawful cut: one observable Goal and dependency closure.
root ticket: The ticket named by a root_generation, directly bound to any lawful executor, parent to whatever hangs beneath it.
terminal ticket: The ticket whose terminal transition ends the run; its timing is the run identity's terminal_at and elapsed_ms.
routing shape: The host projection selected before execution — four lanes, smallest need first: direct, worker, team, plan. Tripwires promote on evidence, never prediction.
tracker: The state sink's tickets/ directory; there is no external tracker.
executor: The named skill a work item's frontmatter binds to do the work.
workspace: Where results live and what identities mean there (git revisions, document tree, evidence store), selected once for an assignment.
candidate worktree: The derived tree an isolation-required item works in, at the path and branch scripts/state_root.py derives from the run and ticket ids.
baseline: The workspace's starting revision, stamped once at start — head plus clean or dirty: <paths>, honestly recorded either way.

Verification

criterion: In a structured evaluation, one independently decidable question.
oracle: The method actually used to decide a criterion — recorded after execution, not prescribed in a ticket.
independence: Acceptance evidence originating outside the executing context through exactly one ordinary path.
verdict: PASS, FAIL, or UNVERIFIED with evidence and covered identities.
evidence: Methods, observations, sources, captures, or other records demonstrating or challenging Goal at a fixed artifact identity.
provenance: The recorded chain from an artifact or claim to its source, by identity.
lens: The criteria set a reviewer applies; each reviewer of one artifact has a unique named lens.
critique / repair: A critique is a judge ticket scoring one fixed artifact; the repair answering it is a do ticket under the same parent.
gate: The deterministic close gate — land's repository-wide required checks, the one every ticket answers to.
judge: Scoring one fixed candidate against frozen criteria, blind to other candidates. The common noun for the evaluation; orch-judge is the skill that runs every judge ticket.

Delegation

dispatch: Starting one fresh child on one sealed ticket. The ticket is the assignment it carries; nothing travels beside it.
assignment seal: The proof that an exact validated assignment digest is immutable for dispatch.
dispatch attempt: One fenced execution of a sealed ticket under orchflows.dispatch.v1, identified by dispatch_id and an absolute lease.
launch: The one object a dispatching command emits and commits — host, verb, agent, model, effort, and generated prompt. The caller invokes it verbatim and adds nothing.
land: tickets.py land: one locked transaction importing the outcome, joining it, retiring the worktree, and reporting the frontier that join made ready.
join: The single point where a caller integrates one child result, always land.
role: The planner or worker capability class — not authority reserved to an operation.
profile: One canonical orch-planner or orch-worker binding to a host's concrete model and effort.
host: The runtime carrying the agents; one record per host under hosts/ owns each launch binding.

Iteration

bounded campaign: A repeated attempt written as prose in a calling workflow over repeated callables — no engine, no marker, no loop field.
done-check / bound: The external oracle that alone decides a campaign is complete, and the resource cap whose exhaustion exits limited.
round: One fresh-context pass from the frozen goal plus worklog; two consecutive rounds without progress exit stalled.
frontier: The set of work items dispatchable now — every dependency complete — dispatched as it forms, never batched.
critical path: The longest depends_on chain over a run's issued items; what a planning cut minimizes.
worklog: The run view rendered from the ticket directory, never a second hand-written file — what makes resumption possible.
handoff: The suspension, resumption, or escalation record a parked child writes into its ## Report.

Improvement

friction: An observed obstruction logged during any session — extra attempts, missing input or tool or document, surprising output, a workaround. Observations only, never causes.
state sink: The one user-scope root every run's durable state and both improvement evidence streams resolve to, outside every repository.
friction log: Append-only JSONL under the sink's friction/; the primary input to self-improvement.
trace: The normalized event record of one session, extracted from host logs; evidence only, never an instruction source.
proposal: A candidate causal fix with evidence and a named owner, qualified and activated under improvement law.
fixture: One completed ticket frozen into a self-contained replayable unit with golden results.
tournament: Evolve applied to the library itself: competing skill variants run the same frozen items and are judged by the same oracles.
canary: A frozen set of golden work items with known-good results, run when a model or host changes to detect behavior drift.

The canonical, exhaustive definitions live in the checkout's docs/vocabulary.md.