Glossary

Term	Meaning
Gate	A checklist that must be honestly satisfied before a stage or card advances. Passed only when the mechanical and semantic layers agree.
Mechanical layer	runner/flow.sh, a deterministic bash engine exiting 0 or 1. Ground truth.
Semantic layer	The model reading SKILL.md, judging what a script cannot: fabricated research, grade-laundered scope, hollow evidence.
Durable layer	The Python and SQLite store holding intake, story, trace, decision, and backlog records across sessions.
Stage	One of the gated planning steps, 00-idea through 05-contract, each producing a file under flow/.
Card	One scoped build session, cards/C-NNN.md, with allowed files, verify, independent test, and evidence.
Contract	Stage 05, the seam between producers and consumers. Written before code, never skippable.
Done-evidence	World-state proof that a card is finished: a live URL, a real invocation, an imported API, a real skill run. Never “tests pass”.
Debt	A recorded, deliberate gate-skip in DEBT.md, with an exposure and a condition for closing it.
Security-class	Auth, authorization, admin exposure, tenancy, payments, data migration, removing validation. Halts an autonomous run; operator-only.
Teach / work mode	Who writes the planning artifacts — you, or the agent. The gates bind identically.
Project type	web, cli, library, or skill. Selects the contract seam and the done-evidence rule.
Concierge	The chat front door that routes natural language through mechanical state to exactly one proposed action.
Drift check	An advisory check that flags disagreement between artifacts: coherence, contract, tokens, consistency.
Attestation	A fingerprint-bound receipt proving a specific reviewed or verified subject, consumed by autonomous runs.
Kill	Abandoning at a gate. A valid, honoured outcome.
Two-strikes	A blocked card gets one repair by a fresh subagent before escalating.
Playbook	Paid-for stack knowledge, read before building on that stack and harvested after. /flow promote shares it across projects.

Canonical definitions live with the skill: skills/flow/SKILL.md