Reference · Glossary

Glossary

The load-bearing vocabulary, alphabetical. Each definition leads with what the term does and what it replaces — the fast way in. For the full law, every term traces back to the canon.

Term	Definition
`appetite`	How much review the spec is worth — the one-sitting scope it deliberately fits; the unit of human attention (B1), governing the spec's reviewability, not the build's size (that's size).
`blast_radius`	The spec's declared risk surface — how much breaks if this is wrong; a ratification-time judgment (low \| medium \| high) that routes reviewer depth, implementer effort, and model tier, replacing a one-size build process.
`coupling ceiling`	The cap on a spec plus everything its relations force an agent to load (B2); a structural ceiling measured once at shaping time, replacing the v2.3 "context budget" — and protecting signal quality, not just capacity.
`decider`	The product owner who decides what to build and that it's done — the non-delegable human at the two gates, replacing a committee or a backlog-grooming ritual.
`deputy`	The one named stand-in who decides when the decider is unavailable; the fallback that degrades the system to paused rather than improvised, replacing a stalled queue.
`Specline`	The deterministic validator that checks a spec's structure in author mode (advisory) and gate mode (CI, strict); it adds assurance, not validity, replacing a human reading the schema by eye.
`graduate`	The agent-executed editing pass, wired to the implementation PR, that turns a shipped spec into present-tense knowledge and archives the contract; it replaces an unowned, never-happening "write the docs" step.
`judgeable`	The acceptance altitude settled by a fresh-context agent judging against a named spec section (its falsifiability gate); the bounded-judgment middle, replacing a human reading every check.
`knowledge`	The permanent, present-tense description of shipped reality (docs/knowledge/); intent and rules and rationale that code can't say, replacing the in-flight, prescriptive spec once it ships.
`loop_budget`	The PO's autonomy grant — the cap on build cycles with no green-checkpoint advance; the progress trigger of escalation, the twin of stale_after's time trigger, replacing an agent thrashing indefinitely.
`parent-map`	A spec of type: parent that holds intent, shared non-goals, invariants, and an index of child scopes — a map, not a plan; it replaces a big "bet" and forbids all mechanics.
`provable`	The acceptance altitude settled by a runnable command (agent-loopable); the build loop's mechanical exit, executed in the implementation PR, replacing prose a human re-interprets each pass.
`ratify`	The act of a named human approving a spec's contract by merging it to the main branch — the merge is the record (git owns who and when), replacing both a verbal sign-off no one can audit and a hand-typed ratified_by field that duplicates git.
`size`	The declared build size (small \| large) set at ratification; the build axis — replacing the old One-Sitting overload, which now governs review (appetite) alone.
`slug`	The kebab-case folder name that IS a spec's identity (docs/specs/<slug>/); unique across specs/, knowledge/, and archive/, and frozen once ratified — renaming a referenced spec dangles its inbound edges. It replaces the ambiguous word "id" — the name is the identity.
`spec folder`	The per-feature directory in docs/specs/<slug>/ holding the build contract and its lifecycle files; the flat, in-flight unit of work, replacing the ambiguous word "feature."
`stale_after`	The date a build is presumed abandoned; not deleted, handed back to you — the time trigger of escalation that quarantines the spec, replacing the v2.3 TTL, which meant discard-on-expiry.
`tasteable`	The acceptance altitude settled once by the decider (human-gate) — taste, product-fit, anything no check can falsify; the unbounded-judgment end, replacing a pretend-automatable taste check.
`tier`	The adoption level a repo declares (0 one spec, 1 the loop, 2 the full system); Specline checks only the declared tier's rules, replacing all-or-nothing adoption.

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Up: handbook — the problem. The law: the canon.