Glossary

A board of tasks and the AI coding agents that work on them, run as one or more Legato instances.

Language

People

Operator: The human who runs a Legato and works with its agents: the one who starts, messages, reloads and approves. Every text Legato gives an agent (messages, prompts, tool guidance, refusals) names them so. Avoid: the person, the user, the human

Instances and handoff

Main instance: A Legato a person works from, which owns its tasks. A person may have several, such as a workstation and a laptop. Avoid: home instance, local instance, source

Worker instance: A Legato that works on tasks handed to it by main instances. One worker may serve several main instances. Avoid: remote, VM, cloud instance, delegate

Instance ID: The identity of one Legato, made once and never changed. Other instances know it by this, not by its name. Avoid: instance name, server name

Handoff: A main instance sending one of its tasks to a worker instance to be worked on there. Avoid: delegation, push, offload

Make-a-change handoff: A handoff whose agent changes the code and ends in pull requests. Avoid: fix handoff

Find-out handoff: A handoff whose agent answers a question in notes and pushes nothing. Avoid: investigation, read-only handoff

Away: The state of a task on its main instance while a worker instance holds it. Avoid: delegated, remote

Recall: A main instance taking an away task back before the worker has finished with it.

Return: An away task coming back to its main instance with what the worker did.

Take back: A main instance ending an away task by itself, without the worker’s results, when the worker cannot be reached or no longer has the task. Avoid: force recall, abandon

Agents on a task

Agent slot: A place on a task for one agent at a time, with its own terminal session, execution and saved conversation. A task has a main slot and may have named slots. Avoid: agent seat, lane, second agent

Main slot: The slot of a task’s own agent: the handoff’s author, and any session the person starts. Anything that addresses “the task’s agent” without naming a slot means it. Avoid: primary agent, default agent

Named slot: A slot other than the main one, such as reviewer. Only Legato starts agents in one; the person can attach to or stop them. Avoid: extra slot, side agent

Interrupted agent: An agent that was running when Legato last stopped and whose tmux session was gone when it started again, because the machine or tmux went down. It is kept until it is resumed, replaced or dismissed. An agent whose session ends while Legato runs has ended, not been interrupted. Avoid: crashed agent, lost agent, dead agent

Review passes

Review pass: One review of a handoff’s pull requests by the reviewer, at heads pinned when it starts, ending in a GitHub review per pull request. The first reviews them in full; a later one reviews what changed since the pass before and rules on the earlier blocking findings. Avoid: review round, review cycle, auto-review, automated review, review tour

Reviewer: The agent in a task’s reviewer slot that does a review pass, on a different model from the author, and only looks. Avoid: review agent, critic

Finding: One problem a reviewer reports on one pull request, kept with a stable ID across passes. Avoid: comment, issue

Blocking: A finding that must be fixed or answered before the work is done.

Nit: A finding that is optional: the author may skip it.

Ruling: A later pass’s judgement on an earlier blocking finding: resolved, or open with why. Avoid: verdict (the whole pass’s outcome)

Clean pass: A review pass with no blocking finding and no open ruling. It approves the pull requests. Avoid: green review, LGTM

Counted comment: A comment on a pull request that the author must answer: from the repository’s owners, members or collaborators, or from a listed bot. Avoid: feedback comment, external feedback

Counted check: A check a pull request must pass before its handoff is done: one branch protection requires on its base, else one the worker lists. Avoid: required CI, gate

Feedback item: One thing the author must handle after a review pass: a finding, a counted comment or a failing counted check, each with its ID and the author’s answer.

Reviewer App: The second GitHub App a worker posts reviews as. Only Legato holds its credential; no agent is given it.

Running Legato

Reeve: The agent of a Legato instance itself, which helps the person run and configure that instance rather than work on a task. Each instance has its own. Avoid: Legato agent, admin agent, management agent, steward, operator

Reeve prime: The Reeve of the instance the person is working from at the moment. It reaches the Reeves of instances paired with its own, and lets them reach it back. Avoid: master Reeve, home Reeve, main Reeve

Reeve pairing: A pairing by phrase between two instances that lets their Reeves message each other, for instances that are not already a main and a worker. Avoid: Reeve link, peer pairing

Change set: The changes the Reeve proposes together for one step, approved or denied as one and carried out by Legato in order. Avoid: batch, plan, transaction

Pinned setting: A setting, or one entry of a list, whose value comes from the instance’s config.yaml. Only an edit to that file changes it; the web UI and the Reeve show it as pinned. Avoid: locked setting, configured setting, read-only setting

File-only setting: A setting that lives only in config.yaml and never in the database: what the instance needs to start, to unseal its secrets, to be reached, and to trust a signature. Avoid: bootstrap setting, static setting

Engrams

Engram: One named individual kept by the engram CLI, with its own memories, open threads and handoffs, that an agent session can be started as. The CLI itself is “the engram CLI”. Avoid: identity, persona, profile

Place key: How engram names where a session runs: repo:<host>/<path> for a repository, dir:<path> for a folder. Engram bindings are kept under it. Avoid: scope (engram’s word for any key a record can carry)

Engram binding: An engram bound to a place key, so the spawn dialog lists it under “This repo” (or “This folder”) there. Made by ticking Remember; kept in the database only.

Default engram: The engram bound to a place that is pre-selected there when the task has no engram of its own. At most one per place.

Neighbouring terms

Delegation: A request from Argus that a Legato fix or find out something about a case. Not a handoff.

Remote ticket: A task that comes from a ticket provider such as Jira or Burnlite. Not a task on a worker instance.