Reference · Glossary

Glossary

The load-bearing vocabulary, alphabetical. Each definition leads with what the termdoes and what it replaces — the fast way in. Terms markedExperimental belong to Part 3 (unattended builds) and are in force only when a repo sets unattended: true. 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 (One sitting), governing the spec's reviewability, not the build's size (that's size, experimental).
`approve`	The decider's go: moving a spec's folder from docs/drafts/ to docs/specs/, in a commit made or approved by the decider on whichever branch the work is on. The commit is the record — git owns who and when, replacing both a verbal sign-off no one can audit and a hand-typed status field. No spec has to merge first. (Formerly "ratify"; the term survives only as history.)
`attended`	The default build posture: the decider is reachable, so the builder disagrees out loud and the spec is edited by agreement as the build teaches. A spec is attended unless its frontmatter says build: unattended — replacing the assumption that every builder is a stranger who can never ask.
`blast_radius`	Experimental. The spec's declared risk surface — how much breaks if this is wrong; a judgment (low \| medium \| high), set at the decider's go, that routes reviewer depth, implementer effort, and model tier once a spec is unattended.
`coupling ceiling`	Experimental. The cap on a spec plus everything its relations force an agent to load; a structural ceiling measured once at shaping time, protecting signal quality, not just capacity, in unattended and parallel builds.
`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.
`drafts/`	The fourth lifecycle folder (docs/drafts/<slug>/) — being shaped, not yet a commitment. Only parse-level integrity runs here; nothing may depend on a draft, so an unpursued one may simply be deleted.
`Specline`	The deterministic validator that checks a spec's structure in one mode — reporting every finding and exiting nonzero when any is an error; 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`	Experimental. The acceptance altitude settled by a fresh-context agent judging against a named spec section (its falsifiability gate); the bounded-judgment middle in an unattended build, 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`	Experimental. The PO's autonomy grant — the cap on build cycles with no green-checkpoint advance; the progress trigger of escalation in an unattended build, the twin of stale_after's time trigger.
`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`	Experimental. The acceptance altitude settled by a command where one fits or grounded assessment against code (agent-loopable); evidence for the unattended build loop's exit, executed in the implementation PR, replacing prose a human re-interprets each pass.
`size`	Experimental. The declared build size (small \| large), set at the decider's go once a spec is unattended; the build axis — distinct from appetite (the review axis), which governs any spec.
`slug`	The kebab-case folder name that IS a spec's identity (docs/{drafts,specs,knowledge,archive}/<slug>/); unique per feature; graduation pairs knowledge/ with archive/, and the slug is frozen once it lands on the merge target — 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/drafts/, then docs/specs/) holding the build contract and its lifecycle files; the flat unit of work, replacing the ambiguous word "feature."
`stale_after`	Experimental. The date a build is presumed abandoned; not deleted, handed back to you — the time trigger of escalation that quarantines the spec in an unattended build.
`tasteable`	Experimental. The acceptance altitude settled once by the decider — Part 1's ### human under its unattended name — taste, product-fit, anything no check can falsify; the unbounded-judgment end.
`unattended`	Experimental. The declared posture (build: unattended, and specline.yml's unattended: true) promising that a fresh-context builder who cannot ask has everything it needs on the page. It puts the envelope — blast_radius, size, target_model, stale_after, loop_budget, status.md — and the canon's Part 3 in scope; off by default, and it changes no rule's severity.

▸

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