Glossary

Plain-English definitions for the terms you’ll see across these docs. Hover or tap any underlined term in the prose to surface a short definition — the Full entry → link in the popover scrolls you here.

admission

Placing a card in the drainable column. Admission is intent; completion is truth.

A column may carry intent and must never carry truth. Dragging a card to a done column declares nothing about whether the work succeeded — only the outcome pointer does that.

Artifact

A work product whose existence and content are observable facts — a file at a path the card’s acceptance criteria named, or a commit.

Distinguish an artifact from a result declaration — a worker’s claim about how it went. The artifact is fact; the declaration is opinion, and nothing schedules off opinion.

Background Runner

The workspace scheduler that drains the Ready column of its connected board, plus queued loops, dispatching each eligible item into its own lane.

See also: Background Runner

Board

The kanban board — the mutable, realtime record of intent: what should happen and in what order.

Boards and cards live in their own collections; the kanban tile is a view of the board, not the board itself. Humans and the root orchestrator both edit it. A board is a queue, not a run — it has no terminal success state.

Card

One unit of work with a prompt — the only work type there is.

There are no step modes. Verification is not a different kind of thing: it is a card that depends on another card. A card is sized by statability — if you cannot write checkable acceptance criteria for it, it is too big or too vague.

continuous drain

The termination mode: a board is a queue, not a run, so there is no terminal success state.

"Idle" means nothing is eligible right now — never that the objective is met. No surface reports "complete" at board level, and a board is never called a Run. Do not confuse this with the Background Runner's drain-once mode ("process the queue until empty, then stop") — that decides when the runner turns itself off; here idle is a queue state, not completion.

DAG

Directed Acyclic Graph — nodes connected by one-way edges that never form a cycle.

A graph where edges point in one direction and no path loops back on itself.

dependency edge

The only edge type — a card’s "blocked by" list.

A dependency expresses necessity, never ordering. The test is: could this card start and produce something useful if the other had not run? If yes, there is no edge. Ordering is expressed by card order within a column, not by edges. The structure is cycle-safe.

Desktop

A named collection of tiles. Use desktop tabs to switch between collections in a workspace.

drain (drain-once)

A Background Runner lifecycle mode — process the queue until empty, then stop.

See also: Background Runner

drain tick

The deterministic dispatch step — one card per call: find one ready card, claim it once, create its lane, spawn its agent.

Returns spawned, at-capacity, or idle. The Background Runner runs it on each scheduler pass. Its "drain-once" and "standing" lifecycle modes decide what an idle result means for the runner, not how the tick dispatches.

drainable column

The one column, chosen in the Background Runner's settings, whose cards are admitted — "this may be picked up".

A runner setting, not a property of a card, and there is exactly one. A new board with To do / Doing / Done columns has To do filled in, so connecting it is one step. Dependencies still decide eligibility; admission alone does not make a card ready. Two drainable columns would need an arbitration rule, which is scheduling policy.

fast-forward

A git merge that moves a branch pointer forward to a descendant commit, with no merge commit.

Only possible when the target branch has no commits the source branch doesn’t already contain.

FF (fast-forward)

Short for fast-forward — a git merge that just moves the branch pointer to a descendant commit, with no merge commit.

Full YOLO

Marketing shorthand for letting the workspace run itself — the Background Runner on, with After success set to Auto merge. There is no one-tap "Full YOLO" preset in the app: the header chip reads "Runner: <state>" (On, Off, No board, Paused, Finishing, Cancelling), and its popover offers "Start runner" (confirmed with the drained board and target branch named, starting the Kanban runner with its saved settings) or "Finish current, then pause", plus "All settings". With no board connected it shows a board and column picker with "Connect and start" instead.

See also: Background Runner

git worktree

A separate working directory backed by the same git repo, with its own checked-out branch.

Native git feature (`git worktree add`). YOLO lanes do not use worktrees: each lane is an independent `git clone` of the workspace repo (see Lane).

Goal

An outcome you want to make happen, with success checks and a plan of steps. You queue each step as a card and review the results; only you mark a goal achieved.

See also: Background Runner

terminal-mux

The service that serves web terminals over HTTP/WebSocket inside every YOLO sandbox. Runs on port 7782.

terminal-mux multiplexes several terminal sessions over one service and carries the context bus that studio.send_to_tile uses to deliver prompts to agent tiles. Port 3000 is left free for your own dev server.

Tile

A panel in the workspace UI. Tiles host agents, terminals, previews, browsers, kanban boards, etc.

See also: Background Runner