Glossary
Action
Section titled “Action”Something an agent is about to do, described so it can be judged: an
action type, the files it touches, a scope, and a summary. Actions are
what preflight.action and context.assemble evaluate.
Admission
Section titled “Admission”The read-time filter that removes memory the calling principal may not see — by tenant, scope, clearance and status. Distinct from ranking: admission is a filter, not a penalty. See Retrieval and admission.
Advisory-first
Section titled “Advisory-first”Verdicts inform; they do not stop your agent inline. A block becomes a hard gate only in the
opt-in CI/PR check. This says nothing about authorization, which is enforced
server-side on every request. See Advisory-first.
Assemble
Section titled “Assemble”context.assemble — the whole governed context of a proposed action in one call: resolved guides,
retrieved memory, a verdict and citations, consistent with each other.
Bi-temporal
Section titled “Bi-temporal”The corpus tracks both when something was true and when it was recorded, so as_of can reconstruct
what an agent would have been told at a past instant.
Capability
Section titled “Capability”Which verbs a principal may call. Enforced server-side, independent of scope and clearance.
Clearance
Section titled “Clearance”The maximum sensitivity a principal may read. Orthogonal to scope: scope is where, clearance is how sensitive.
Decision
Section titled “Decision”A verdict’s outcome: allow, warn, block or require_approval. A decision a client does not
recognise is treated as a hold.
Degraded
Section titled “Degraded”A response produced under pressure with reduced depth, flagged degraded: true. A success, not
an error — admission is never degraded. See Degraded mode.
A typed relationship between memories: supports, contradicts, supersedes, applies_to,
caused_by, inherits_from. One hop is returned with each hit.
Evidence
Section titled “Evidence”The immutable, append-only record of engineering activity. Corrections are made by adding, never by editing. See Evidence.
A refusal, carrying a code, a message, a field, retryable and a
request_id. On MCP it arrives as a 200 with isError: true — the server answered, and the answer
was a refusal.
Guidance
Section titled “Guidance”An SDK’s interpretation of a verdict. Go and TypeScript expose hold (true = stop); Python exposes
proceed (true = go). See Interpret a verdict.
Idempotency key
Section titled “Idempotency key”Travels as options.idempotency_key. Identity is derived from the key together with the content,
so a retry must replay byte-identical bytes — re-stamping event_ts produces a different identity
and appends a duplicate even when the key matched.
A memory’s type: fact, decision, lesson, policy, skill, guide, evidence. Kind carries
precedence — a policy outranks a lesson.
Memory
Section titled “Memory”A typed, scoped, provenance-bearing claim derived from evidence. Not a document and not an embedding.
Model Context Protocol. Vectadyne’s primary interface, handshake-free — no initialize, no
session, every request standing alone.
Principal
Section titled “Principal”The authenticated identity behind a request — human or machine — carrying a tenant, scopes, a clearance and capabilities.
Provenance
Section titled “Provenance”The chain from a memory back to the evidence that produced it. What lets an agent cite its reasons and a human check them.
Purpose
Section titled “Purpose”Why an action is being taken: code_review, deploy, incident_response, refactor, feature,
dependency_upgrade, data_migration. Changes which guides resolve.
Reason
Section titled “Reason”A justification attached to a verdict, with a severity and citations — fragile_file,
violates_policy, contradicts_decision and others. The part that makes a verdict actionable.
Risk class
Section titled “Risk class”The caller’s own assessment: low, medium, high, critical. The server need not agree, and the
interesting cases are where it does not.
A stage of the adoption ladder: ATTACH, MEMORY, ANALYTICS, GOVERNANCE. Each is useful alone.
Where a memory applies, as level:id — repo:payments, org:acme. Only exact match and
org:* are structurally computable in v1; everything else fails closed. See
Scopes and inheritance.
Segment
Section titled “Segment”A labelled portion of a context window reported through context.report. An unreported segment is
stored absent, never zero.
Sensitivity
Section titled “Sensitivity”How protected a memory is: public, internal, restricted, secret. Compared against a
principal’s clearance at admission.
Status
Section titled “Status”A memory’s currency: active, disputed, stale, deprecated. deprecated memory is excluded
from current results.
Tenant
Section titled “Tenant”The hard isolation boundary. No request shape crosses it.
Topic guide
Section titled “Topic guide”The standing answer to “what should anyone touching this know?”, resolved fresh from applicable memory rather than stored as a stale digest.
Verdict
Section titled “Verdict”The result of judging an action: a decision, reasons, citations, and a degraded flag. Information,
not an intervention.