glossary

Terms of art

The vocabulary of self-maintaining software, one line each. Deep-link any term.

autopoet #: The one-per-system heartbeat actor that self-maintains the software it lives in: sensing, deciding, acting, learning.
autopoiesis #: Greek auto (self) + poiesis (making) — Maturana and Varela's term for a system that continuously produces and maintains itself. The idea this product is named for.
heartbeat #: The opt-in schedule that wakes the autopoet — every 15 minutes by default, disarmed until an admin arms it.
sense → decide → act → learn #: The four phases of every beat: gather concerns and requests; propose concrete edits; evaluate and route; write the outcome down.
concern #: A telemetry item the autopoet senses on its own — drift, error-rate shifts, cost anomalies — as opposed to a filed request.
ceiling #: The maximum capability set for a subtree, declared in its index.work. Effective ceiling = the intersection of every ancestor ceiling; capability only flows down.
effective grant #: What an agent actually holds at run time: declared grant ∩ every ancestor ceiling, plus any active leases — re-resolved every turn.
structural triad #: Grant, ceiling, management — the three fields the autopoet may propose changes to but never land alone.
management posture #: A per-agent or per-subtree stance, mutable only by humans: managed (autonomous within ceiling), proposed (human merges), frozen (untouchable). Most restrictive ancestor wins.
frozen #: The posture that puts an agent entirely off-limits to the autopoet — the stance it permanently holds toward itself.
lease #: A scoped, expiring, non-delegable grant of one capability to one principal. Unblocks a task without ever moving a ceiling.
typed request #: The structured self-edit filing — target, typed change, verifiable evidence, testable acceptance, untrusted why — filed fire-and-forget by any agent.
injection firewall #: The rule that decisions key on the typed change and verifiable evidence, never on free prose — so injected text is context for a human, not an instruction.
eval-in-scratch #: Validating every candidate in a throwaway copy of the tree — parse, purity, authority — before anything live is touched.
verdict vs autonomy #: Two orthogonal outcomes of eval: pass/fail says a change is well-formed; autonomous/human-gated says who may merge it. A valid grant change is pass and human-gated.
purity #: The invariant that index files hold only composition, config, and ceilings — never executable logic. Impure indexes fail eval.
merge gate #: The pre-land check every change passes — human or autopoet alike: references and capabilities resolve, the tree compiles, checks are green.
hot-reload #: Push-based propagation of a merged file to everything referencing it; long-lived agents pick changes up at their next turn.
knowledge log #: The append-only, human-readable lessons file — one line per lesson, topic-tagged, with evidence. Learning is data; data can't escalate.
handoff #: A self-contained task brief — title, task, context, inputs, acceptance, assignee — so a delegated agent never needs to ask a clarifying question.
plasticity #: Bounded Hebbian learning on the workspace graph: co-activation strengthens edges, disuse decays them. The system's map of itself, drawn by use.
surprise gate #: A cheap predictor that prices every event's novelty; only misses reach the expensive model, and every answer installs a reflex.
reflex #: An installed handler born from one model escalation — the same situation handled at near-zero cost forever after. TTL-bounded.
drift #: "My own predictor got worse on its own data" — a sustained fast/slow prediction-error ratio that files a concern into the next beat.
the economy #: Credit assignment by selection: components bid to act, whole chains are paid on verified outcomes, wealth is fitness, the ledger is auditable.
Goodhart tripwire #: Held-out metrics the learner is never rewarded on, watched for divergence — the alarm for a system gaming its own reward.
constitution #: The five fences taken together — ceilings, the triad, postures, leases, eval-in-scratch + typed requests. The shape that makes safety structural.
nexus #: The Workbooks runtime a workspace runs on; the autopoet is its self-maintenance layer — one autopoet per nexus.
.work file #: The literate plain-text format everything is authored in — agents, apps, config, ceilings, and the autopoet's own knowledge.