Glossary

Glossary

The terms used across Nautelle, its UI and this wiki. The engineering glossary is in docs/product/glossary.md.

Platform

Term	Meaning
Control plane	The web app, the API and PostgreSQL. It stores everything and serves the UI. It never touches a project's filesystem.
Runner	nautelle-runner, a daemon on each machine that hosts projects and agents. It observes and acts for the control plane.
Pairing	Exchanging a one-time code from Admin › Runners for a runner token.
Runner policy	The runner's local security policy: allowed roots, the highest permission mode and the dangerous actions it allows. Only nautelle-runner policy on the machine changes it.
Project	A GitHub repository on a runner, connected by its path.
Docs source	Where a project's specs, ADRs and roadmap live: a folder in the repository or a separate repository.
Runtime	An agent CLI: claude or codex.
Runtime profile	How a runner launches a runtime: the binary, its environment (for example CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR) and extra arguments.

Board

Term	Meaning
Board	A project's own work board: To Do → In progress → Finished → Completed, plus an Inbox of suggestions and a Drafts strip of candidates.
Card	A work item on the Board, numbered C-<n> per project and stored by Nautelle, not GitHub.
Candidate	A card proposed by the new work intake. It waits in Drafts until a person accepts it.
Split	An intake result of 2–8 independent cards.
Stack	S-<n>: staged cards that share one design, each stage depending on the one before.
Card worker	The dedicated interactive Claude session that Run starts for a card, in its own worktree and tmux session.
Card round	One Run, or one round of feedback, on a card. Not an orchestrator round.
Fix round	A round Nautelle starts by itself when a card's pull request has a red check or a conflict. There are at most 3 per pull request.
Auto-run	Starts a card once all of its dependencies are accepted.
Auto-merge	Merges a card's green pull request without a person. It is a per-project switch.
Discuss	A Board dialog for questions about the repository. It never makes a card.
UI profile	A project's cached, versioned style kit that design mockups are drawn from.
Frame	One named mockup in a design revision.
Handoff note	A short structured note per card that the next round or session resumes from.
Incident	One stuck situation that Steward detected.

Fleet

Term	Meaning
Orchestrator	A session running the Code Sentinel orchestrator for one project.
Round	One orchestrator pass.
Slot	One unit of dispatched fleet work: an issue, its worktree and its tmux session cs-<slot>.
Worker	The session in a slot.
Checkpoint	A worker's progress report: picked up, plan ready, implementation done, pull request open, blocked or misclassified.
Fence	A slot's owns: and never: globs, enforced for Claude workers.
Ready label	cs:ready by default. It marks a GitHub issue as dispatchable to the fleet.

Cost and control

Term	Meaning
API-equivalent cost	What the recorded tokens would cost at public API prices, whatever subscription you actually pay for.
Budget	A spend limit per project or per user, per day, week or month. It either alerts or stops new runs.
Action request	A decision a session or the assistant asks a person for. It appears in Approvals and in Telegram.
Away mode	Sends Claude Code permission prompts to the web app and Telegram while you are away from the terminal.
Skill run	A headless session that runs one skill on one project.
Schedule	A cron rule that creates skill runs or orchestrator commands.