Glossary

// the station’s words, in plain English

bdibranding uses game words for real machinery. Each entry gives the plain meaning first and, where the app uses a different label, that label in a tag.

PEOPLE THE FLOOR BELTS WORK LEARNING AUTONOMY PLUMBING

People and crew

AGENT: One AI worker with a name, a class, a model, a desk, and its own memory. Every crew member on the floor is one. Runs are real model calls with real tools.
OVERSEER: The first agent you create. It runs the station and recruits every agent after it. It can’t be deleted.
COMMANDER: You. The dossier the crew keeps on its commander is what “it studies you” means.
CLASS RECRUITMENT BAY: A head start, not a cage: a Researcher comes tuned for digging, an Engineer for code. 35 curated classes on the roster, a 20-deep SPECIALIST ARCHIVE, plus any custom classes you build or save from an agent.
CREW: All your agents together. Agents without their own bay draw on gear placed anywhere on the station. An agent with its own bay uses the gear in its desk’s room, and needs its own computer there. You can assign one piece of gear to several agents in their dossiers.
SKIN: The character an agent wears. 16 to pick from, any class, changeable any time in the agent’s CONFIG tab. Cosmetic only.
DELEGATION: One agent dispatching subtasks to crew it summons, then folding the results back. You watch the whole tree run on the floor.

The floor

STATION: Your whole world: rooms, hallways, decks, props, belts, and the crew inside it. Its layout is real configuration, not decoration.
REFIT REFIT STATION: Build mode. Ten tools on keys 0–9: select, room, hallway, surface, move, delete, prop, belt, copy, lines. Undo always works.
GEAR / PROP: A placed object. Some gear grants a real ability to the agents that use it (see CREW for whose gear is whose): DISH = WEB, INTEL CAB = FILES, WORKBENCH = TERMINAL, CORE = MEMORY, STUDIO = IMAGES, CONSOLE = COMPUTE. Place one of each and the station is fully powered.
BAY a desk: Where one agent sits. Every bay is another agent working in parallel. An agent’s bay needs a computer in its room, or the floor says NO COMPUTE.
COMMS: The chat panel where you direct the station and where every beat — rate the work, keep this memory, confirm this quest — arrives.
TRUTHFUL TELEMETRY: The station’s core law: it never shows state the harness can’t prove. A lit desk is a live run; the timer is the real one; a dark belt really won’t run.

Belts and lines

BELT: The path work takes across the floor. Laid with the BELT tool (7): click one machine, then another. Lit means “this will run”; dark means something is missing.
LINE: A whole job’s route from front door to out tray: machines plus the belts between them. Every line has a budget ($2.00 per job unless you raise it).
BOX WORK ITEM: One job in transit. When you see a box move, an agent is really working right then — except the faint ghost crate that previews an unfinished line, and the PREVIEW FLOW test crates, which are animations only. The app’s tooltips call it a work item.
INBOX the front door: Where outside work — a routine, a message from a paired chat — enters and drops onto a belt. Its card holds the line’s name and budget. COMMS orders skip it and land at the agent’s bay.
OUTBOX the out tray: Where finished work leaves the line. Click it to read and rate finished runs.
FILTER a signpost: Reads each job’s text and sends it down a lane: CODE, RESEARCH, or EVERYTHING ELSE. Never drops work. Needs a default lane.
SPLITTER: Fans work across its lanes. Alone: jobs take turns (load-balance). With a JOINER downstream: every lane gets the same job (fan-out).
JOINER: A barrier that waits for every branch (10 minutes for a late one, adjustable), then sends one merged crate on.
MERGER: A lane funnel: several belts in, one belt out, every crate rides straight through. Combines lanes, never jobs. Nothing to configure.
LOOP: The one tile that makes a cycle legal: a DONE lane and a BACK lane, up to 5 passes by default (20 max), optionally until a reviewer says APPROVED.
LANE: One belt leaving a signpost’s tile. A filter or splitter needs at least two; a joiner needs at least two coming in.
LINES / BLUEPRINT LINES tool, key 9: Nineteen ready-made layouts — FRONT DESK, RESEARCH LINE, REVISION LOOP, SORTING OFFICE, PARALLEL CREW, THE GAUNTLET and more — dropped in one click.
ROUTING PLAN: What your belts compile into: the exact plan the server executes. The box you watch and the run that happens are the same plan.

Work

RUN: One agent doing one job: a real model call with real tools, a real timer, and a real cost line in the ledger.
DELIVERY: What a run produced — a file, a report, a reply. Lands in the OUTBOX or in COMMS for you to read and rate.
RATE THE WORK: The beat after any run that did real work: ▲ nailed it mints XP; ◆ close and ▼ missed are noted with no XP and no penalty.
RECIPE WORK › RECIPES: WHAT to run: a ready-made job with a small form. 101 built in; save your own.
ROUTINE WORK › AUTOMATION: WHEN it runs: a job on a schedule. Drops in at the INBOX. Only fires while scheduling is enabled.
SKILL BUILD › ABILITIES: HOW to do it: a procedure an agent consults mid-task when the work matches. Over seventy built in, more written by agents themselves or installed from a SKILL.md you inspected.
TASKS: Where live work sits — the queue you can see.

Learning

DOSSIER CREW › COMMANDER: What the station has learned about you, in nine dimensions (identity, stack, goals, working style, standing orders, pain points, ambitions, people, schedule). Every agent’s briefing folds it in. Local-first; pin, edit, or forget anything.
BELIEF: One thing the dossier holds, traced to where it came from. Proposed after runs; you Keep, Edit, or Discard.
MEMORY CORE AGENT DOSSIER › MEMORY: An agent’s own long-term notebook. Each memory traces to the run that earned it. Trust grows with use and halves every 30 days unused; low trust is de-weighted, never silently dropped.
XP / LEVEL: Minted only by your nailed it verdict. Levels record what shipped and gate nothing. Level 2 at 50 XP, 5 at 500, 10 at 2,250.
QUEST LOG: Your goals broken into 3–5 milestones, advanced only by real completed work. ◆ YOU ARE HERE marks the open step.
RECOMMENDER: Suggests one thing at a time — a recipe, a class, a bespoke specialist — and only with evidence. A suggestion that can’t say why is dropped.

Autonomy

NIGHT SHIFT: The station choosing a small grounded job while you’re away (30 minutes idle), about every 45 minutes, inside your leash. Off by default.
INITIATIVE: Does it start work on its own? WAIT (default) · SUGGEST · BUILD · FREE.
REACH: How far an unattended action may go. OBSERVE (read only) · SANDBOX (default; builds and writes locally and never sends, publishes or spends — your model provider and web reads still go out) · SEND & PUBLISH (may send, publish or spend).
PACE / LEASH: How many unattended jobs per day: LIGHT 1, STANDARD 3 (default), BUSY 6, MAX 12.
MORNING REPORT: What COMMS prints when you return: what fired, what was skipped and why, drafts to review. Every line maps to a real record.
DECISION LEDGER RECENT DECISIONS: An append-only trail of every autonomous fire, skip, and defer with the gate that decided it.
BUDGET: Hard USD caps — per run, per agent, per day, global — enforced against the real ledger, on top of each line’s own budget.

Plumbing

SIDECAR: The small local server that does the actual work, on 127.0.0.1. The app window talks to it; nothing talks to a bdibranding server.
WORKSPACE: Where your station state lives on disk: transcripts, memory, ledgers, routines. In the desktop app: %LOCALAPPDATA%\ai.bdibranding.harness\workspaces on Windows, ~/Library/Application Support/ai.bdibranding.harness/workspaces on macOS. A run from source (developer mode) uses the same folder on Windows. A station an earlier version kept elsewhere is moved there on first launch.
PROVIDER: Who runs the model. Sixteen in the installed app, OpenRouter by default (the developer version adds the ChatGPT and Grok sign-ins); Ollama is free and fully local.
BYOK: Bring your own key. Your key, your provider’s bill, real cost shown per run. No markup.
LEDGER: The append-only record of every run’s true spend. What the cost readouts are read from.
CHANNEL: A paired chat app — Telegram, Discord, Slack, Matrix, Signal — where your agents appear as contacts and take orders.
OWNER PAIRING: Every channel: a one-time 10-minute code you send the bot as a direct message (/pair on Telegram), so the first stranger to message it doesn’t own it. A paired owner’s direct messages have full control by default; change that in SETTINGS › PERMISSIONS.
CONNECTOR / MCP: A way to plug in an outside service (Gmail, a calendar, a docs tool) or to let another harness drive your station. Granted explicitly, never assumed.
SERVICE KEYS ABILITIES › SAVED API CONNECTIONS: Keys for the services your agents call — kept locally, separate from your model provider key.
LIVE VOICE: Hands-free talking to the station on a speech engine built into the app. No key, no account, your voice never leaves the machine.