Glossary

Access. The {effect, scope, cost} requirement on a transition descriptor. A session sees and may call a transition only if its grants satisfy it.

AILANG. The deterministic, effect-typed programming language World uses as its transaction language. Lives in sunholo-data/ailang; World consumes released binaries only.

Archive. The content-addressed store of binaries next to the world store. --ailang-bin and --tool-ailang-bin are archived and re-hashed before use.

Attended. An operation that requires a human at a controlling terminal: session mint, world-publish approve, publish, transitions.

Broker (effect broker). The in-process authority boundary that decides, journals, executes and records every brokered effect.

Budget. The amount a grant may spend, in the effect's cost units (calls for the coding tools). Persisted per episode.

Calling convention. Every transition exports main(input: string) -> string. Effectful transitions are called in a plan phase and, optionally, a finish phase.

Capsule. The subprocess floor a transition runs in: pinned interpreter, --caps "", FS jail, scrubbed environment, timeout, output cap.

Capability. See grant.

Clause. One of the seven checkable end-states of the World 1.0 bar in the mission charter.

Commit. A compare-and-append that adds objects, a world row and one log entry, accepted only if the observed head is still the selected head.

Coordinator (invocation coordinator). The host component that runs a transition call: bind, plan, effect, finish, commit.

Credential ID. The hash of a session token that the store keeps; used to revoke.

Declared effects. The exact {effect, scope, cost} triples a transition's plan may request.

Effect. A named kind of interaction with the outside world, such as Workspace.Read or Ailang.Run. The only nondeterminism in World.

Effect plan. The world/effect-plan/v1 object a pure transition returns to request effects. At most one effect per plan in v1.

Effect record. The immutable world/effect-record/v1 object written for every allowed, denied or failed brokered effect.

EffectsUnrecorded. The error returned when an effect ran and was recorded but the call did not commit. Names the effect record refs over A2A.

Epoch (semantics epoch). A number the epoch registry assigns to an interpreter release; log entries and descriptors carry it so history is replayed under the right semantics.

Episode. The unit of work a session belongs to. Names the budget ledger and, for the coding tools, the worktree <workspace-root>/<episode>.

Genesis. The first commit of a store, with an empty observedHead.

Grant. EFFECT=SCOPE:BUDGET minted into a session, with an expiry. Matches a request on effect name, exact scope, liveness and cost ≤ budget.

Head (selected head). The current world ref.

Indeterminate. A receipt state meaning the outcome is unknown. Fail-closed: never retry automatically.

Interpreter pin. The archived interpreter's content hash, written into every log entry and descriptor. Reported as interpreter_ref by /v1/health.

Invocation record. The world/invocation-record/v1 (pure) or /v2 (effectful) object a log entry's transitionRef points at.

Journal. Durable intents and outcomes for commits and effects; the source of receipts and budget spend.

Log. The append-only sequence of transition entries, each with a six-field header.

Object. A content-addressed blob with hash, interfaceHash, semanticId and provenance. Never modified.

PIN. The interpreter release that runs transitions: AILANG v0.41.0.

Policy (episode policy). The restricted AILANG policy rendered per episode at <db-dir>/policies/<episode>.toml, which confines the coding tools.

policy-tool. The AILANG binary's typed tool interface, run by the handlers for every coding tool except ailang-run.

Provenance walk. Answering "why did this happen" by following content-addressed references through the read API.

Receipt. The three-state outcome of a rest: commit: resolved, not-started, indeterminate.

Registry (transition registry). The published, pinned set of transitions at world/transition-registry/v1.

Replay. Re-deriving a recorded invocation from its pure transition plus recorded effect results, without calling any handler. Implemented in the library; no operator verb yet.

Residual. A known, measured gap with a named owner.

Scope. The string an effect is authorized over. Compared exactly. The coding tools use worktree.

Self-contained module. A transition source that imports only std/*, so it type-checks in an empty scratch root.

Semantic ID. An object's type-like name, for example world/effect-record/v1. Queryable with GET /v1/objects/by-semantic-id/….

Session. A 64-hex bearer credential bound to one episode, a set of grants and an expiry.

SSE. Server-Sent Events. /mcp/ replies as event: message with the JSON on a data: line.

STOP. world-publish's refusal: STOP fence=<name>, exit 3, nothing happened.

TOOL. The AILANG release the coding tools run: v0.52.1.

Transition. A pure, pinned AILANG program and the only way World's state changes.

TTY fence. The requirement that a process have a controlling terminal, and for world-publish that stdin be that terminal.

Workbench. The read-only HTML operator renderer at /workbench.

World. An immutable state value: {ref, revision, stateRoot, logHead}.

Worktree. The git worktree an episode's coding tools are confined to.