glossary

Thirteen words, in the shortest form that is still true

In short. Every other page in this wiki uses these words without stopping to explain them, which is what keeps those pages short. If one of them did not land somewhere else, it is defined here in one line.

Read on if a word somewhere else went past you. Skip to What it is, or A question on screen.

No jargon is defended here. Where a word has a plain-English equivalent, the plain one is the definition and the technical one is the thing in brackets.

The three words everything else rests on

Word	What it means
agent	A program that works on its own, deciding its next step as it goes. On your machine that usually means a coding agent running in a terminal.
MCP	The convention a coding agent uses to reach tools outside itself. AgentBox is one of those tools, and registering it once is what lets every session reach you.
daemon	The one AgentBox process that stays running in the background and owns every window. Everything else is a short-lived command that talks to it.

What actually arrives on your screen

Word	What it means
card	The window a question arrives in: dead centre of the monitor you are looking at, above every other window, and it never takes your keyboard.
item	Anything an agent put in your queue, question or not. A card is what an item looks like on screen; the inbox is where it is afterwards.
level	How much an item claims to matter: info, success, warning, error or urgent. It picks the colour, the sound, and whether the thing takes itself off your screen.
earcon	The short sound that plays before you look. There are six, so what kind of thing arrived is known before your eyes move.

Note

Level and blocking are different things, and confusing them is the commonest mistake on this vocabulary. A question at info still gets a full card and still waits for you, because whether something blocks is a property of the call rather than of its level. Urgent is the only level that changes the rules by itself.

Words that only matter with several agents running

Word	What it means
area	Which piece of work a session is in, usually the repository it started in. It is how AgentBox knows which agents are in a position to collide with each other.
session key	The private id of one running session. It is why two agents that both call themselves claude are still two separate rows on your board.
lock	A named claim on one shared thing: the deploy, a repository, a machine. One agent holds it, the others queue, and you stop being the one who sequences them.
signal	A note one agent posts and others wait for. Waiting for a peer this way costs one parked call rather than a check every five minutes.

Two things an agent can put in front of you

Word	What it means
artifact	A small interface an agent wrote for you to use rather than read: a slider, a form, a control panel. It runs with no network at all.
walkthrough	A change laid out as steps you walk at your own pace on the review board, and hand back in one go instead of a dozen turns.

Next: what a question looks like when it arrives, or the limits worth knowing before you install it.