24terms, defined the way we actually use them. If a word means something specific here, this is where it's pinned down.
[ 01 ]A → Y — 24 terms
Ask desk
The two-way support surface at /help/ask. You ask a question, it becomes a ticket with a thread, and a human answers. It replaces a community forum at our scale — one desk, no noise.
Capability token
A scoped, unguessable token that grants access to exactly one thing — like reading a single support thread — rather than a whole account. If it leaks, the blast radius is one resource, not your identity.
Compounding loop
The economic engine: a retained user generates context, context makes the product more useful, usefulness deepens retention. Each turn of the loop costs less and returns more than the last.
Context graph
The memory layer. Documents, calendar, tasks, and finance signals are indexed into one graph a run can draw on — so you never re-explain yourself. Reads are mediated by the trust kernel.
Darkroom (dr) system
The design system this site is built in: near-black ground, hairline rules, mono labels, and a single volt accent. Every token is a CSS variable prefixed --dr-, so themes swap without rewriting components.
Ecosystem
The end state, not the starting claim. Eight lanes entered in sequence, each earned by the one before it. An ecosystem is earned, not declared — that line is the company.
Gateway
The API edge. Every request passes through it for authentication, rate limiting, and routing before touching the runtime. When the status page shows an edge incident, this is the service that blinked.
Honeypot
A hidden form field humans never see but bots dutifully fill in. Submissions that include it get a fake success and go nowhere. Every public form on this site carries one.
Incident
An unplanned degradation of a service, tracked on /status with a duration and a postmortem. We publish what actually broke and what changed afterwards — the postmortem is the point.
Lane
One of the eight product domains on the map — intelligence, work, communication, finance, and so on. Lanes are entered strictly in sequence; a lane is opened by retention in the previous one, never by ambition.
Max steps
A hard ceiling on how many reasoning-and-action steps a run may take before it must stop and report. It bounds cost and keeps a misbehaving run from wandering. Set per request, enforced by the runtime.
Planned maintenance
A scheduled window where a service runs degraded on purpose — index rebuilds, migrations, pool resizing. Shown as a dim cell on the uptime strip, distinct from an incident's red.
Postmortem
The written account of an incident: what broke, how long detection took, and what structurally changed so it cannot recur the same way. Published on /status. No euphemisms.
Retention cohort
Everyone who first used the product in the same week, tracked over time to see who comes back. The cohort curve is the single most honest measure we have — it cannot be talked upward.
Run
One unit of work executed by Y0: a prompt, a slice of context, a bounded number of steps, and a result. Created via POST /v1/runs; every run produces a trace.
Runtime (Y0)
The wedge product. Y0 plans a run, pulls what it needs from the context graph under trust-kernel scopes, executes within max_steps, and returns a result with a full trace. Everything else is built on it.
Scope
A named permission the trust kernel understands — calendar:read, documents:read, finance:read. A run can only touch context its scopes allow, and the trace records every scope actually used.
Sequence
The only order that works: wedge before platform, platform before ecosystem. The roadmap's now/next/later columns are this discipline applied to engineering.
Trace
The step-by-step record of a run: the plan, each context fetch, each action, the result. Traces are replayable and are how you debug a run instead of guessing at it.
Trust kernel
The permission layer between runs and your context. It checks scopes before every read, writes an audit line for every access, and is deliberately small enough to reason about. Trust is load-bearing here.
Uptime
The percentage of a day a service answered correctly, as measured by external probes. The /status strips show 90 days per service; the number is computed, not asserted.
Volt
The single accent color of the darkroom system (--dr-volt). It marks the live thing: the active state, the ✓, the pulse dot. If everything were volt, nothing would be — so almost nothing is.
Wedge
The one narrow product that must prove three things before anything else gets built: people come back, people pay, and we can reach them at a survivable cost. Y0 is the wedge.
Y0
The cognitive runtime and first product — pronounced "why-zero". The name marks the origin point: year zero, lane zero, the product everything else must be earned by.