B03 / Build
Glossary
The canonical Guild Stack vocabulary for nesting, lifecycle, host, substrate, review, knowledge, and model tiering.Page evidence and guidance
Every other docs/v2 page, the website, and the plugin code use these terms exactly. This page is the single visible home for them; it does not redefine anything, it only points at the canonical definition.
Nesting model
Workspace
A repo that contains other repos or .guild/ roots inside it. A workspace federates its sub-guilds’ knowledge — it queries them, it never duplicates them.
Project
One repository plus its durable .guild/ knowledge (wiki, graph, config, memory). The default unit Guild operates on.
Initiative
The durable goal a human owns across sessions. Opt-in: asked, never auto-attached. A one-off run creates no initiative.
Run
One execution or analysis pass that produces evidence under .guild/runs/<run-id>/. A run produces evidence; an initiative owns progress.
Lifecycle
Phase
One of six entry concepts: Init, Ideation, Planning, Development, Quality, Operations.
Lens
One of three ways to traverse the single state machine: linear, phase, or initiative. Bare /guild is not a command; a verb is always required.
Gate
A decision/approval checkpoint at a phase review boundary. User gates pause for a human; adversarial-review gates record a cross-host or same-host verdict.
Loop
A bounded iterate-until-satisfied cycle inside a phase (clarify, plan-review, implement) with a round cap.
Host, substrate, review
Host
The orchestration environment that runs Guild Stack. guild.host_registry.v1 currently names 16 target host IDs, each with its own evidence state.
Substrate
How specialists are executed: tmux agent-team, tmux-spawned host-CLI session, in-process agent, or subagent fallback. The how-specialists-run axis.
Adversarial / cross-host review
Review performed by a different host than the author. Cross-host review is strong; same-host fallback is weak and recorded. The who-reviews axis.
Degradation
An observable loss of capability. Degradable features take a lower rung and record a reason in their primary artifact; a missing critical capability fails the phase instead of pretending success. Some normalized feature-degraded trace emitters remain migration targets.
Knowledge model
Wiki
The canonical, human-curated project knowledge base under .guild/wiki/.
KnowledgeGraph
The derived semantic graph of the codebase (.guild/indexes/knowledge-graph.json). Rebuildable, never canonical.
Knowledge Links
The derived edge layer (.guild/indexes/knowledge-links.json) connecting work, knowledge, and behavior into one model.
Memory
Project knowledge organized by lifetime, recalled (recall-before-read) into lean per-lane context bundles.
Tiering & execution
Tier
The model class a lane runs at: cheap (read/summarize), mid (default; draft/reason), powerful (architecture/security/graph). Host-agnostic; mapped to concrete models in config.
Ephemeral task agent
The target one-agent-per-task lifecycle: spawn at resolved tier, pull lean context, work, emit handoff, dismiss. The tmux backend currently reuses one specialist pane across that specialist’s tasks; strict per-attempt task cells are not fully shipped.
Advisor escalation
A low-tier agent emitting escalate gets one powerful-tier answer for that sub-question, then continues — no wholesale re-run.
Full definitions
The table above is a fast-scan index. For the complete, unabridged definitions — including the frozen contract and artifact table (run manifests, handoff receipts, trace events, and the rest) — read the canonical source doc directly in the repository; this page never re-spells those definitions, it only points at them.
See Also
- How Guild Stack Works for the phase-by-phase lifecycle.
- Hosts for the host support matrix.
- Project Memory & Wiki Pattern for the knowledge model.
- Cost & Tiering for tier routing.
