Glossary
The model is meant to be referenced by other repositories, which makes its vocabulary a shared surface. Every term below is defined on exactly one page; this page collects them and points at the definitions.
Approver
Section titled “Approver”A person allowed to approve what the leash stops. Any approver may approve a stop in any workflow, or pre-approve the gates of a run. Approvers per workflow are deferred. SDD calls this role the Council. See Leash.
Artifact
Section titled “Artifact”One type of thing in a repository, never one file. Four vendor plugin manifests are one artifact. Defined in Artifact-sets.
Artifact-set
Section titled “Artifact-set”A group of artifacts, grouped along one of two orthogonal axes — unit of change or governance target. The unit the model reasons about, and the node in the lattice graph.
Conflict
Section titled “Conflict”A join no state can meet: two criteria that stand together and contradict each other. Resolved by a recorded decision, not by running workflows again. See Join.
Confluence
Section titled “Confluence”The guarantee: whichever artifact you change first, the repository settles into a state that meets the same criteria. Claimed over topology, not over bytes. See Confluence.
Connection
Section titled “Connection”An undirected relation between two artifact-sets that must hold. Never a handler that fires, and never an arrow. It relates their specifications, not their implementations. See Connections.
Controller
Section titled “Controller”Whatever holds one artifact-set consistent, on a spectrum from agent definition through skill, instruction, and governance to deterministic code. A compiler is a controller. It works within a set, where a workflow works between sets. A controller holds a set; a workflow owns one. See Controller.
Downstream candidate
Section titled “Downstream candidate”A workflow that reads a changed set as an input. Found by a lookup over declared roles. It reads the change itself and runs from the changed set downward, asking nothing above it. See A change finds its candidates.
Coordinates
Section titled “Coordinates”The properties that are free to differ between two runs of the same change — prose, section order, file organisation. The complement of topology.
Criteria
Section titled “Criteria”The half of a specification stating what must be true of the outcome. Evaluable against the implementation as a blackbox, which is what makes criteria survive a change of representation.
Discharge
Section titled “Discharge”Where a workflow requires strain on a crossing to be resolved. SDD’s implementation gate is a discharge point. One of the parameters a workflow declares.
Distillation
Section titled “Distillation”Reducing an arriving change to its intent, separated from the particular expression of it. Only a change is distilled, never an intent. Each workflow the change reaches distills it within its own span, and states what it is for, not whether it is right. A workflow that finds nothing abstains. Writes nothing, and produces no criteria: those come from each set’s controller. Irreducibly agentic, and the step that carries the confluence guarantee. See Canonical execution.
Formal workflow
Section titled “Formal workflow”See workflow. The catalog uses the longer name for staged processes expressed in the model. See the catalog.
Governance target
Section titled “Governance target”Axis 2. Artifacts the same criteria apply to. State-driven — it needs no diff.
Implementation
Section titled “Implementation”The role an artifact holds on an edge where something else constrains it. A blackbox: the model reasons about its outcome, not its internals. A role, not a kind of artifact — see Specification.
Incompleteness strain
Section titled “Incompleteness strain”A specification and its implementation disagree while both are in hand. Intra-unit-of-change, and it blocks. See kinds of strain.
Input, owned, output
Section titled “Input, owned, output”The three roles a set can hold in a workflow. An input is read and never written. An owned set is read and written, and can be revised in place. An output is emitted: it cannot be revised, only superseded. Roles are where direction lives, since a connection has none. See Three roles.
Intent
Section titled “Intent”The half of a specification stating what the thing is for and which direction it should move in. Argued with, not evaluated. An arriving change carries intent too, and distillation is what separates it from the change’s expression.
The operation that combines sets of criteria: their union, the same in any order. Taken over criteria, not over states. Where a connection says where criteria flow, the join says how criteria reaching one place combine. See Join.
Lattice
Section titled “Lattice”The concept the system is worked out from, in three readings: the crystal that settles back, the graph that redistributes load, and the order-theoretic structure whose join combines criteria. Used in prose, never as the wordmark. See The lattice.
Which writes an agent may make in a workflow without an approver’s approval. Owned writes proceed when criteria pass and nothing in the set’s standing specification is removed or reversed. Output writes, writes that contradict the standing specification, and architect or oracle outcomes need approval by default. Confidence only tightens it. See Leash.
Lifting
Section titled “Lifting”Raising a raw line diff into artifact-set vocabulary. A prerequisite for everything downstream, because an unlifted diff and a connection are written in different languages.
Missing strain
Section titled “Missing strain”A controller above a change’s source answers that its set lacks a criterion the change’s intent implies: the implementation meets something its specification does not state. Relative to a change, unlike the other kinds. See kinds of strain.
Nonconformance strain
Section titled “Nonconformance strain”Criteria are unsatisfied with no counterpart implementation in the delta at all — evaluable on a cold repository, with no diff. The axis-2 strain.
Obligation strain
Section titled “Obligation strain”A specification whose implementation lives elsewhere — an accepted ADR constrains modules it does not contain. Does not block, must be tracked, and can be declined.
Reconciliation
Section titled “Reconciliation”The source’s controller joining the change that landed with the criteria arriving from above. It reports what it kept of the change, what it changed, and what it added, and that report is the comparison the leash reads. See Reconciling at the source.
Request
Section titled “Request”The intent a workflow hands a controller when it asks for criteria or asks for a write. A Request to a controller above the source carries no expression of the change. See The handoff.
Run ledger
Section titled “Run ledger”The append-only record of a run: pending jobs, what each waits on, criteria versions, resolutions, and decisions. It collects the contributions addressed to each set, with their provenance, and never merges them. Its ready frontier is the jobs whose inputs have no pending writer. It schedules to reduce rework and never makes a run correct. See The run ledger schedules.
Selection
Section titled “Selection”Finding the workflows a change needs: its upstream and downstream candidates, filtered by what the controllers above the source answer, and every owner of an affected input, each triggered by a routed job carrying the root intent. An affected set no declared workflow can write is raised as an obligation. Extended as replays produce changes of their own. See How workflows are selected.
Source
Section titled “Source”The artifact-set a change landed in. Settled by definition for the run: the controllers above it derive criteria without seeing the change, and its own controller reconciles the change against them.
Specification
Section titled “Specification”Intent and criteria together. Also the role an artifact holds on an edge where it constrains something else — per-edge, so one artifact is a specification on one edge and an implementation on another. See Specification.
Standing specification
Section titled “Standing specification”A set’s use cases, decision graph where it has one, and criteria as they stood before a run. The leash compares a write against it. See Criteria are authored through use cases.
Staleness
Section titled “Staleness”What scoping identifies: which artifacts a change has left inconsistent with the rest of the system. The observable that strain describes.
Strain
Section titled “Strain”A connection whose relation does not currently hold. Comes in four kinds that block differently: incompleteness, obligation, nonconformance, and missing. A strain is exactly one of the four, never a score on each.
Topology
Section titled “Topology”What the criteria constrain, and so what must converge across entry points. Usually scenarios, actors, and edges. The thing confluence is claimed over, and the thing the model’s acceptance test diffs.
Unit of change
Section titled “Unit of change”Axis 1. Artifacts that must move together for a change to be complete — what belongs in one commit to be coherent. Delta-driven.
Upstream candidate
Section titled “Upstream candidate”A workflow that owns or outputs a set a change landed in. The change skipped that workflow’s derivation, so it asks the controllers above the set what must move, and replays from the highest affected set. Found by a lookup over declared roles. See A change finds its candidates.
Workflow
Section titled “Workflow”A named policy over the lattice. It declares its span, the role of each set in it, its shape, where discharge happens, its strain policy, and its leash. It works between sets; a controller works within one. See Workflow.
Terms deliberately not used
Section titled “Terms deliberately not used”Recorded so they are not re-proposed.
| Term | Why not |
|---|---|
| Fabric | A third near-synonym for lattice and topology makes all three fuzzy. What it reaches for — the subgraph a given change affects — needs an obviously different word, not an overlapping one. |
| Arrow, direction on a connection | Direction is a property of where the delta landed, not of the relation. Writing it into the connection bakes in one workflow. |
| Handler, trigger for a connection | A connection states a relation that must hold. Procedural framing needs one path per direction and loses confluence immediately. |
| Truss in prose | The wordmark, and the mental image behind it. The concept is the lattice. |