Glossary

Every term of the method in one sentence, grouped by kind.

Every term of the method, one sentence each, grouped by kind. For terms that also appear in the working paper’s glossary, the working paper remains canonical; this file adds the terms introduced after it (standards and domain files, intent weights, the readiness gate, the slicing vocabulary, findings) and is the complete current register.

Written artifacts

Full treatments: the artifact layers, the constitution, the working loop, and the practitioner guide for complete examples of each artifact.

Term	Meaning
Constitution	The one-page law of a project: numbered clauses, each of which would justify stopping work if violated. Read by every agent, every session.
Clause	One rule of law (C-01, C-02, …), carrying the version it entered at.
Amendment	The only way the constitution changes: a diff with written rationale (change, reason, rejected alternatives, what becomes invalid) and a semantic version bump.
Constitution stamp	The line on every piece of work recording which constitution version it was built under.
Decision record (ADR)	The reasoning behind a clause or a choice; read on demand, not by default.
Standards file	Technical conventions for one area (naming, error handling, testing), one screen each; loaded only when a slice declares them. Convention, not law.
Domain file	Cross-feature business facts (domain rules, fixed lists, how the customer operates), human-written, loaded per declaration.
Collaboration corpus	Written norms about working together, learned at retrospectives: wording that works, slicing rules, calibration values.
Idea	A backlog entry; free to capture, carries no obligations, and is not yet an intent.
Feature intent	The human-owned statement of purpose: why, success in user terms, scope, and known requirements. Has a weight class.
Weight class	Light (purpose, success, scope, knowns) or full (adds scenario, decisions, sketch); full applies to new user-facing surfaces, expected constitution contact, or larger features.
Known requirements	The intent’s fact list under the provenance rule.
Provenance rule	Facts the human actually holds may be written at any length; nothing may be invented to make a document look complete.
Primary scenario	Full-weight intents only: an owner-written walkthrough of a named user doing the real thing; writing it forces the behavior decisions.
Behavior decision	A choice about how the feature behaves, explicitly made by the owner in the intent.
Deferred decision	A choice the owner has explicitly left open, bound to the demo that will answer it.
Sketch	An owner-drawn mockup for a new surface; binding for structure, not for pixels.
Slice list	The feature’s decomposition into slices, with ordering rationale and risk flags.
Slice spec	The one-screen specification of one slice: summary, acceptance criteria, Standards and Domain lines, a “not specified on purpose” list, and the stamp.
Acceptance criterion	A single checkable statement, tagged [test] (must become an executable test) or [prose] with a justification (checked at a demo).
Deviation report	Written when work stops mid-build: what the spec assumed, what is actually the case, two or three options with consequences, and the recorded decision.
Deviation log	One line per implementation-detail deviation; raw material for the retrospective.
Atomic PR	The single reviewable unit: code, tests, and any spec change together, with the stamp and the deviation log.
Verdict	The recorded outcome of a demo: validated, misaligned, or intent evolved, with who drove and what artifacts resulted.
Finding	One recorded contradiction between a spec and the system, with detection and resolution dates; classified descriptive, normative, or constitutional.
Archive	Sealed specs of validated slices; read-only, and stale by design.
Derived document	A description of current behavior regenerated from code on demand; never maintained by hand.

Structural concepts

Full treatments: the working loop, slicing the work, and the artifact layers.

Term	Meaning
The loop	The working shape: intent, slice, specify, build, verify, validate, learn, with three backward paths.
Backward edge	Any defined channel through which learning flows against the direction of production and changes the plan.
Durable layer	The small, law-like document layer (constitution, ADRs, invariants); maintained deliberately, read every session.
Ephemeral layer	Per-slice working documents (intents, specs, criteria); archived after validation, not maintained.
Derived layer	Documents regenerated from the source of truth at read time; cannot go stale.
Layered truth	The precedence rules: code and tests decide what the system does; the constitution decides what it should do; a contradiction between the two is a discovered defect.
Slice	The unit of work, defined by the user question it answers; called increment in the papers, and the two words mean the same thing.
Walking skeleton	The mandatory first slice: the thinnest end-to-end cut, ugly but real, demoed before further slices.
Spike	A timeboxed investigation of an open question whose deliverable is a written answer; it never ships code and never has acceptance criteria.
Sizing rule	The binary size test: one human can review the change in one sitting, and one agent can build it in one session.
Split catalog	The preferred seams for splitting an oversized slice: scenario, data variation, scope, operation, rule depth, fidelity; never layer or activity.
Detail budget	Specifications state what must stay true, not what happens to be true, because descriptive prose goes stale.
Readiness gate	The adversarial check before slicing: a full-weight intent whose owner cannot walk the scenario goes back at the cost of a conversation.

Protocols and events

Full treatments: deviation and drift, the validation architecture, and Learning that lasts.

Term	Meaning
Deviation protocol	The rules for a mid-build discovery that the spec is wrong: classify observably, stop or log, never diverge silently.
Observable classification	The sorting question: what must change? Tests, interfaces, or the constitution moving means behavioral; internals only means implementation detail.
Andon	The stop-the-line event for behavioral deviations, named after the Toyota practice.
Consortium	Whoever the authority matrix designates to decide a stopped deviation, within the latency budget.
Latency budget	The agreed maximum time for an andon decision, with a named default if it passes.
Drift	Divergence between specifications and the system, discovered after the fact; treated like bugs, not like shame.
Drift pipeline	The four stages of handling drift: prevent, detect, triage, learn.
Conformance sweep	The check that reads specs against code and reports contradictions; a retro ritual first, a standing agent later.
Graduation trigger	The evidence threshold for moving from ritual to standing agent: the ritual keeps finding real drift.
Drift half-life	The health number: the time from a gap appearing to the gap being fixed.
Skeleton demo	The human-driven demo of the walking skeleton, before further slices are built.
Feature demo	The guaranteed human-driven walkthrough before a feature seals.
Risk-pulled demo	An on-demand demo of a slice that touched the constitution, stopped the line, or sits in a drift-prone area.
Brains-eyes-hands rule	A demo watched as a recording or read as a summary does not count; the human operates the software directly.
Retrospective	The learning event after a validated feature, with three routed outputs: system learnings, collaboration learnings, drift findings.
Comprehension audit	The retro check that each human’s validation authority is backed by recent hands-on contact.
Gardening	The scheduled pruning of the durable layer: consolidate, delete, promote, demote, with no lost enforcement.
Promotion / demotion	Moving a repeatedly violated fact into the constitution, or moving over-specified prose out of it.
Impact census	After a major amendment: querying the stamps for all work built under older versions and dispositioning each.
Honest rollback	Reverting an amendment with the stamped list of work built on it in view, so the cost is enumerable.

Authority concepts

Full treatments: the authority matrix and Keeping humans in charge of what matters.

Term	Meaning
Core invariant	Humans always own the why; automation only ever moves who owns the check.
Authority matrix	The per-layer assignment of checking work between humans and agents, recorded in the constitution.
Fixed row	Feature intent and validation, which never transfer to agents in any configuration.
Graduated autonomy	Authority moves toward agents on a recorded track record and returns on incident, like a licensing system.
Mandate	The written, human-held, revocable grant under which a lead-architect agent may decide amendments.
Human sampling	The share of agent-reviewed work that humans still review; never zero, serving as tripwire and comprehension spend.
Correlated verification failure	The hazard of agents checking agents of the same model family: shared blind spots approve the same error every time.
Scribe	The agent role at demos that turns spoken feedback into spec-diff proposals for the human to approve in session.
Goodhart anchor	The rule that self-improving agent processes are judged only against human demo verdicts, never against internal numbers alone.
Rulebook	The numbered rules R1 to R36, defined across the deep-dive papers.