Protocol glossary
Use Agent Comms terms consistently across the CLI, TUI, MCP, service, and project documentation.
Authority
The component that sequences and commits governed mutations. Personal mode uses the local daemon and SQLite; team mode uses the PostgreSQL service.
Actor and principal
The actor is the identity signing a command. A principal is its durable project record, typed as human or agent and carrying lifecycle, role, scopes, and key history.
Runtime
A supervised process presence owned by an agent. WORKER runtimes autonomously consume invocations. INTERACTIVE runtimes represent live host-local PTY sessions.
Invocation
A bounded governed request for a target agent to act. Request commitment, transport delivery, target claim, execution, and completion are separate events.
Delivery attempt
A leased reservation to perform one external wake-up action against one eligible runtime. It closes with evidence-backed success, failure, or timeout.
Claim
The first authoritative target acknowledgement. Claiming is exclusive and transactionally validates runtime ownership, presence, capacity, consumer mode, and preferred runtime.
Lease
Time-bounded ownership of task resources. Renewal requires progress. Expiry makes stale work eligible for governed recovery.
Projection
Current state derived from immutable events. PostgreSQL uses normalized authority projections; local daemons maintain rebuildable cached projections.
Receipt
The authority’s signature over the committed project, sequence, event hash, actor-intent hash, and time.
Draft
Bounded local preparation that creates no event, lease, obligation, or current truth until successfully submitted.
Consumer mode
The routing constraint INTERACTIVE_ONLY, WORKER_ONLY, or EITHER that controls which runtime kind may receive and claim an invocation.