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Docs / Reference / Glossary

Glossary

Plain definitions of the terms these docs use, and the facet values every page is tagged with.

Page facets

Every page is tagged with these values, so a reader or an agent can filter pages by them.

Facet: Audience

  • operator
  • team lead
  • admin
  • developer
  • tenant admin

Facet: Surface

  • the Desk
  • Slack
  • meetings
  • email
  • phone and MCP

Facet: Ladder rung

  • rule
  • replay
  • local judge
  • frontier model
  • person

Facet: Product area

  • company memory
  • the decision record
  • the decision ladder
  • the Desk
  • ingestion
  • agents at work
  • a copy for every team
  • integrations

Facet: Tenancy scope

  • platform
  • team copy
Harness
Everything around a model that makes it dependable at work: memory, checked context, a record of decisions, and bounds on what agents may do. The model is the engine; OCTOPUS is the harness.
Context graph
What the organization knows, kept as typed, linked facts about people, organizations, products and events, so relationships are kept rather than cut into text chunks.
Schema-validated context
Context that is checked against an explicit shape before any model sees it.
Decision record
The written record of a decision: the options, the reasoning, who made it, when, and what they chose, readable later.
Decision ladder
The order in which a decision is answered: an agreed rule, a past decision, a smaller model, a large model, or a person.
The Desk
The place, phone first, where a person makes the decisions and approvals that belong to a person.
Team's copy
A separate copy that holds only one team's material, kept apart by architecture, not by policy.
Closure on evidence
A task is done only when the effect is seen to have landed, not when the agent says so.
Lane
One stream of agent work, with its own scope and its own level of autonomy.
Shadow
A way to run new automation that records what it would have done and does nothing outside.
Kill switch
A single control that stops one new behavior.
Held
The state of a lane that was braked on purpose.
Unknown
The state shown when a signal cannot be read. It is never shown as healthy.
Concierge
The public assistant on octo.ad, also reachable over MCP as ask_octopus, that answers from public material.
Markdown twin
The plain markdown copy of a docs page, at the same address ending in .md.