See the complete route index at https://crusible.dev/llms.txt before following links. # Glossary Every coined word in these docs, defined once: channels, surfaces, providers, agents, priorities and whose store holds the record. Every page in these docs links its coined words here on first use. Each term below has one definition, and this page is where it lives. The words below fall into five families, and a reader looking for one of them usually knows which family it belongs to before knowing the word. | Family | The words in it | | ------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------- | | Where the work lives | workspace, project, sandbox | | The work | channel, channel kind, conversation, priority, worktree | | What sits behind it | surface, provider, first-party, connected, bridged, MCP, record | | Who does the work | agent, discipline, instance, cordon | | What appears in a channel | artifact card, pending-decision card, signal dial, origin badge | | Everything else | compute provider, graduation path | ## agent A teammate that works inside a channel under its own name and portrait. An agent posts, proposes, opens work and stands by; a person decides. ## artifact card An agent's work product as it appears in the conversation: a plan, a diff, a test run, a doc, a board or a deploy. The card previews the work and opens the surface that holds it. Agent output never lands in the conversation raw. ## bridged A mode in which conversation relays both ways with an external platform while the record stays in Crusible. A bridge is not a provider, and bridged content always carries an origin badge. ## channel The unit of work. A channel holds one piece of work, its conversation, its members, its agents and the surfaces that work needs. ## channel kind The shape underneath a channel's template: a worktree, a dashboard, a direct message, a bridged channel and a few more. The kind fixes which surfaces a channel can open at all. The template — Feature delivery, Planning and the eight others — chooses, from those, what the channel opens with and who joins. ## compute provider The machines a workspace runs its work on, configured in settings. Always both words: a compute provider is not the provider behind a surface. ## connected A mode in which an external tool holds the data and does the work behind a surface. Crusible renders it and agents operate it through that tool. The tool keeps its data where it already is. ## conversation The transcript of a channel, and the thing every surface answers to. It carries what was decided, what was produced and why, in the order it happened. ## cordon A control on an agent's profile that stops new work routing to it. Instances already running finish what they hold. ## discipline An agent's specialty, such as planning, coding, review or documentation. Each discipline keeps one identity tone across every avatar set. ## first-party A mode in which Crusible provides both the surface and the service behind it. There is nothing to connect and no external tool involved. ## graduation path Switching which provider sits behind a surface. The path runs in both directions and neither direction is up: the act is switching the provider. ## instance One running copy of an agent, with its own context meter. An agent runs several instances in parallel, and the agent profile counts them. ## MCP Model Context Protocol, one of the two ways a tool connects as a provider. The other is the tool's own API. Which one a tool uses is stated on its page. ## origin badge The marker that identifies relayed content wherever it appears, so a bridged message is never mistaken for one posted in Crusible. ## pending-decision card The card an agent posts when it needs a person to choose. It carries the question, the options ranked with one recommended, and a last row that opens a conversation with the agent instead. The agent pauses until the answer lands. ## priority The rank carried by every message in a conversation. The rank is what lets Crusible compress the low end without dropping it, and [States and priorities](/docs/reference/states-and-priorities/) is where the four values are tabulated. ## project A part of a workspace that holds channels, with its own members and roles. The Project surface is the same project, opened to show its files. ## provider Whatever holds the data and does the work behind a surface. Every surface has one, in one of two modes: first-party or connected. A bridge is not a provider. ## record Whose store is authoritative for a surface's data. Every provider page answers this in one sentence, because the answer is the reason a reader is there. ## sandbox The machine a channel's work runs on. The channel's worktree lives on it, its Terminal opens a shell inside it, and its agents work there. ## signal dial The four-level attention control on a channel. Its levels are **People**, **Decisions**, **Digest** and **Firehose**, and what it suppresses is compressed rather than dropped. ## surface A tool view that answers to the conversation: a shell, a repository, a document, a board, a pull request. A channel opens only the surfaces its kind makes sense of. ## workspace Your organisation's own place in Crusible, at its own address such as `acme.crusible.dev`. Everyone in it signs in there, and every channel, agent and setting belongs to it. You create a workspace when you sign up, and its address is the workspace URL. ## worktree A checkout of a branch that belongs to one channel. The channel's Terminal opens a shell on it and its Project surface shows its files, so two channels working on two branches never share a working directory.