| Backend | Where Acolyte’s persistence and future remote execution are hosted — local or cloud; the deployment level, broader than Storage and distinct from Provider |
| Base Agent Input | Immutable prompt input created during prepare and used for the generation pass |
| Chat Promotion | State transition that moves completed chat rows from the active (re-rendered) region to static (write-once scrollback) |
| Chat Viewport | The whole live chat surface — header, transcript, pending, composer, and footer — modeled as one ordered semantic unit and laid out by terminal layout |
| ChatRow | One display block in the chat transcript; may render as many visual lines (e.g. a usage summary or status panel) |
| ChatViewportPresentation | Semantic, renderer-independent description of the chat viewport derived from the presentation input; consumed by terminal layout to produce a Terminal Scene |
| ChatViewportPresentationInput | Lossless per-render snapshot of live chat state that chat-state publishes as the input payload for viewport presentation; carries raw state only, no derived wording or layout |
| Cloud Sync | Feature that syncs memory and sessions to a hosted cloud API for portable agent identity across machines |
| CloudClient | HTTP client that implements MemoryStore and SessionStore against the cloud API |
| Composer | The chat input surface — prompt text, cursor, picker, suggestions, help, and status — modeled semantically and laid out by terminal layout |
| Context Budgeting | Token allocation strategy that reserves system space first and fills the remaining budget by priority |
| Distill | Memory source that extracts observations from conversations at project, user, or session scope |
| Ecosystem Detector | Pluggable rule that identifies the workspace type and resolves available tooling |
| Effect | Lifecycle-owned side-effect applied per-tool-result via callback (format, lint) |
| Embedding | Provider-generated vector representation of a memory record used for semantic recall |
| Entry | Runtime or pipeline item used during processing and not necessarily persisted |
| Frozen Overflow | TUI renderer optimization where active content lines that exceed the viewport are written once to scrollback and excluded from subsequent re-renders |
| Host | Runtime environment around the model that provides tools, lifecycle structure, and memory |
| Hybrid Recall | Relevance-ranked memory selection using a weighted blend of cosine similarity and TF-IDF token overlap |
| Input Controller | Renderer-independent owner of the composer’s logical text and cursor; reduceInput applies edit actions with no terminal geometry |
| Lifecycle Policy | Centralized limits and defaults for lifecycle behavior |
| Lifecycle State | Internal task-scoped runtime state used during the lifecycle pass |
| Memory Distiller | Extracts and commits observations from conversations after each request |
| Memory Corpus | Active, recallable memory records across the scopes visible to a request; archived records are excluded |
| Memory Engine | Top-level memory capability that maintains continuity across turns |
| Memory Pipeline | Internal memory flow from ingest through commit |
| Memory Policy | Centralized limits and defaults for memory behavior |
| Memory Toolkit | On-demand tools (memory-search, memory-add) the model invokes to access memory at runtime |
| Message Kind | Semantic message classification used by history handling (text, tool_payload) |
| Model Judgment | The model’s responsibility for deciding how to complete the task within host constraints |
| Observation | Memory record kind for facts extracted from conversations via memory-observe tool calls |
| Policy | Centralized subsystem rules, limits, or defaults that make intended behavior explicit without owning the implementation |
| Provider | Model service selected for a request (openai, anthropic, google, or vercel) |
| Record | Persisted entity object stored by a persistence layer |
| Registry | Composition layer that wires implementations into an agent-facing surface under shared contracts |
| Resource ID | Typed cross-session identity key used for memory and execution scoping |
| Session | One chat session in memory, including messages, model, token usage, and timestamps |
| SessionRecord | One stored session record |
| SessionState | Aggregate session state (sessions[], activeSessionId) |
| SessionStore | Read/write/create interface for session persistence |
| Skill | Declarative prompt extension defined in a SKILL.md file with metadata and compatibility constraints |
| Skill Roster | Ambient per-turn line listing the activatable (non-active) skills and their descriptions, from which the model selects via skill-activate; the selection surface, distinct from the loaded-skill store |
| Step Budget | Per-turn tool-call limit inlined into tool execution to prevent runaway loops |
| Storage | The persistence mechanism a *Store uses for memory and session records — sqlite (local) or cloud |
| Task | Lifecycle work request moving through accept, queue, run, and terminal states |
| Task Queue | Runtime queue policy that orders accepted tasks and enforces capacity and cancellation boundaries |
| Terminal Scene | Physical styled lines, cursor geometry, and finalizable section identities produced by terminal layout for the renderer |
| Terminal Theme | Fixed internal mapping of semantic style roles to terminal-neutral styles; not user-configurable theming |
| TF-IDF | Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency; weights token matches by rarity across the memory corpus so uncommon terms score higher |
| Token Overlap | Keyword matching component of hybrid recall that catches exact term matches embeddings miss |
| Toolkit | Group of domain tools exposed through adapters and composition |
| TranscriptRow | Semantic transcript entry (message, tool, command, or tasklist) with a stable id and lifecycle state; the persisted successor to ChatRow |
| Turn | One model response to a user message, including all tool calls within that response |
| Workspace Command | Typed shell command descriptor used for lint, format, and test commands |
| Workspace Profile | Cached per-workspace detection result containing ecosystem, package manager, and commands |