Glossary

Actor — a named identity, human or automated, in the signed registry. Admission — the owner act by which a machine is accepted into the fleet. Backend — a specific agent tool the engine can drive. Billing class — a seat's recorded billing relationship (subscription, metered, or local-energy); absent reads as unknown, never as permission. Capability — a claim about what a machine can do, carrying a provenance grade. Casting — binding a run to a specific machine and seat. Ceremony — a deliberately manual, witnessed procedure for creating root key material. Confinement — the operating-system boundary within which an agent process runs. Control plane — the machine that composes and dispatches work. Delegation — root-signed, scoped, time-bounded signing authority granted to an actor. Gate — a decision point requiring an explicit human act. Law — the ratified standing documents governing how work is done. Lease — the TTL on a capability record, after which the claim is stale. Projection — a human-readable file generated from the signed log; never the source. Record — the signed append-only log that is the system's source of truth. Runner — a machine that executes dispatched work. Seat — a named executor identity on one machine slot, with its own configuration home. Slot — one unit of execution concurrency on a machine.