Glossary
This page defines every term hlix uses in a load-bearing way, and links each one to the page that owns it. If a word in these docs is doing more work than its everyday meaning, it is here.
Start with the four confusable pairs — they cause more misreadings than the rest of the vocabulary combined.
The four pairs people get wrong
Section titled “The four pairs people get wrong”| These look alike | …but | And this one |
|---|---|---|
| Workspace — your tenant/organization | ≠ | Coding Workspace — one project’s sandbox |
| Revision — an immutable snapshot’s identity | ≠ | Generation — its monotonic counter |
| Worker persona — how work is assigned | ≠ | Execution lane — what run history reports |
| Harness — the coder binary that edits files | ≠ | Agent role — the orchestration job an LLM does |
The work tree
Section titled “The work tree”Workspace · Your tenant. Better-auth calls it an organization, the API header calls it X-Organization-Id, the CLI calls it --workspace, and the product calls it a Workspace. One entity, named by layer — workspaceId and organizationId are the same value. → Work tree
Project · One codebase under hlix’s control. Owns a Coding Workspace, zero or more repositories, a roadmap, a budget, and its own revision history. → Work tree
Cycle · A multi-task unit of work with its own conversation — the level a roadmap is planned into, and the level that executes. → Cycles
Task · The atomic unit of execution: one worker agent, one git worktree, one branch, one outcome. → Tasks
Wave · The set of tasks a cycle dispatches in parallel. Outcomes are collected per task, so one failing task does not cancel its siblings. → Cycles
Roadmap · The project-level plan the orchestrator produces from your brief, and re-plans after each cycle outcome. → Agents & orchestration
Triage · The stage every cycle is created at, and the decision made there: forward it to planning, or cancel it. Judged by the Triage Agent from the request’s content, never skipped by any intake path. → Triage
Lane · The risk classification a cycle is routed into, derived by versioned platform rules from how well understood and how risky the change is — never named by the model. Four of the nine lanes force a human approval before dispatch on their own. → Triage
Priority · The integer a cycle carries, derived from the urgency tier Triage judged: 300 urgent, 200 high, 100 normal, 0 low. Ready cycles dispatch highest first, and orderBy=priority lists them the same way. Not a named level, and not something the planner can change. → Triage
Stage history · The record of every status move a cycle made — from, to, when, who decided (human, agent, or rule), under which rules version, and why. It is what the delivery metrics are computed from, and the reason a stage change is always attributable. → Cycles
Who does the work
Section titled “Who does the work”Orchestrator · The project-level agent that turns a brief into a roadmap, dispatches cycles, and decides what happens after each outcome. One per project — there is no master orchestrator above them, and no path by which the work it creates skips Triage. → Agents & orchestration
Triage Agent · The one-shot, tool-less agent that judges an incoming request’s complexity, risk and urgency and decides whether it becomes a cycle. Not part of a project’s team; its model is configured separately. → Triage
Worker agent · An agent that executes one task. Which persona it takes decides how the work is framed. → Agents & orchestration
Worker persona · The role a task is assigned under — the six named identities defined in the DNA layer. Personas route work; they are not what run history reports back. → Agents & orchestration
Execution lane · What a run actually records: planner, builder, tester, or reviewer. Several personas share one lane, so a Senior Engineer’s run and a UI Engineer’s run both appear as builder. → Agents & orchestration
Harness (also coding agent) · The program that edits your code inside a task — hlix, our own, or an external coder you already use: claude-code, codex, cursor-agent. Chosen per task by a six-rung cascade whose bottom rung is hlix. → Connect your agents
Hlix (the harness) · hlix’s own coding agent, driven from the backend rather than launched inside the sandbox. The default when a task names no other harness, and the only one whose reasoning streams live and whose turn appears in a cycle’s Transcript. → Connect your agents
Agent role · An orchestration job an LLM performs — classifier, interviewer, planner, reviewer, chat, orchestrator, worker, triage. Each maps to a model you can override. Unrelated to which harness runs. → Connect your agents
ACP driver · The in-sandbox process that launches an external coder and reports its result. Every harness except hlix runs through it. → Connect your agents
Execution and isolation
Section titled “Execution and isolation”Coding Workspace · One project’s persistent execution environment — a sandbox with a filesystem and a shell, durable across the project’s whole life. Idle sandboxes stop themselves; the filesystem survives, and the next task resumes it. → The Coding Workspace
Worktree · A git working tree checked out from the project’s shared clone, one per task, so concurrent tasks never share a checkout. → The Coding Workspace
Task branch · The branch a task commits to, created off the base branch inside its worktree. Repository-backed projects push it; repo-less projects merge it locally. → GitHub
Repo-less project · A project with no Git remote. Task branches are merged inside the Coding Workspace and the result is snapshotted and downloadable — no GitHub required. → The Coding Workspace
Merge lock · The mutex serializing merges into a project’s default branch, held per repository so two repositories in one project do not queue behind each other. → The Coding Workspace
Files, snapshots, and sync
Section titled “Files, snapshots, and sync”Revision · One immutable snapshot of a project’s files, identified by a revision ID. Never edited — a change creates a new one. → Push, pull & sync
Generation · The monotonically increasing counter on a revision. push is a compare-and-swap against the expected revision ID and generation, which is what makes a lost race a conflict rather than a silent overwrite. → Push, pull & sync
Manifest · The hashed inventory of a snapshot: every file’s path, size, and SHA-256. Comparing manifests is how local-versus-cloud drift is computed without transferring anything. → Import a project
Bundle · The Git bundle carrying the snapshot’s files and history. Hashed before upload and verified after. → Import a project
Snapshot commit · The synthetic commit an import creates in a temporary clone so dirty and untracked files can be captured without touching your repository. → Import a project
Protected file · A recognized credential-bearing file — dotenv, .netrc, cloud credentials, .npmrc. Excluded from Git and moved through encrypted storage instead. → Secrets & protected files
Quarantined resource · An agent brief, skill, or MCP configuration that import preserved encrypted but deliberately did not activate. Activating one is a separate, explicit command. → Import trust model
.hlixignore · Project-local additions to the snapshot ignore list, in Git-ignore syntax. It cannot hide a protected file; those are found regardless. → Initialize a project
Context and review
Section titled “Context and review”DNA · The composed identity every hlix agent is built from — voice, principles, and standards, cascading System → Owner → Org → Project. It is why two agents on one project produce consistent work. → Context, memory & DNA
Memory · Durable, scoped knowledge the workspace has learned, retrieved by semantic search inside a tenant-namespaced index. Only approved memories are composed into prompts. → Context, memory & DNA
Scope · Which level a memory applies at, and the object it is attached to. → Context, memory & DNA
Review evidence · The verified record behind a task’s change — the diff read back from the repository host, the checks, and the provenance. It is an observation, not the agent’s own summary of itself. → Reviewing output
Revision request · Sending a task back with unresolved comments folded into its feedback, re-entering the cycle rather than starting over. → Reviewing output
Transcript · The stored, post-hoc record of what each pipeline agent was told and what it answered — prompt and response, redacted. Distinct from the live streams, which do not survive a reload. Agency-only. → The dashboard
Approval gate · The human checkpoint before a gated cycle dispatches. Off by default at the project level; a forced lane opens it regardless. → Approvals
Pending request · The durable record of a blocking question — an approval, or an agent’s elicitation — that a run parks on until it is resolved. → Approvals
Extensions and integrations
Section titled “Extensions and integrations”Skill · A reviewed SKILL.md activated for a project, giving agents a named capability. → Import skills, agents & MCP servers
MCP server · A Model Context Protocol server. Inbound: one you activate inside a cloud project so agents can use it (Import skills, agents & MCP servers). Outbound: the official @hlix/mcp server, which lets a coding agent on your machine read your workspace (Official MCP server). Opposite directions; do not confuse them.
Environment · A per-project bundle of variables, files, skills, and MCP servers that a Coding Workspace loads. → Environment discovery
Pack · A pre-built capability bundle baked into the sandbox image. → The Coding Workspace
Client collaborator · An external customer invited to one project, fenced by a second authorization layer beneath the workspace boundary. Can read and comment; cannot change execution settings. → Import trust model
Release and audit
Section titled “Release and audit”Release ledger · packages/releases.json — the single source of truth for which package versions are publicly available. Written last in a publication run, which is why the availability page can be trusted. → Availability
If a term here does not match what you see
Section titled “If a term here does not match what you see”- Run history shows
builderbut you assigned a UI Engineer. Expected — personas route work, lanes report it. See the two-column table above. - The API says
organizationIdwhere the UI says Workspace. Same value. The auth and data layers keep better-auth’s vocabulary deliberately; never introduce a second tenant concept. - A term appears in the API reference but not here. The generated reference describes the contract’s own field names, which are not always product vocabulary.