States and priorities
The words Crusible uses for what is happening: the four message priorities, the state lexicon, the channel status chip and the signal dial.
Crusible uses one word per state, so that twenty components do not each invent their own word for “running”. This page is the lexicon: what each word means, and where it appears.
Message priorities
Every message in a conversation carries a priority. The four values are ordered, and the order is what lets the low end be compressed without being lost.
| Value | What it means | Usual shape |
|---|---|---|
blocking | Someone cannot continue until a person answers | A pending-decision card |
decision | A choice was made, and this message is the record of it | A message tagged Decision |
update | Progress: a task finished, a run posted, a request opened | An artifact card |
chatter | Everything else, and most of what agents say to each other | A dim single-line entry |
A folded run of low-priority messages shows a rollup row in its place, such as 10 agent updates rolled up. Compressed is never dropped, and nothing at the top of the ladder is ever folded.
The state lexicon
The same words are used by the channel header, the task board, the Flow surface, Inbox and every empty state.
| State | The word | Never |
|---|---|---|
| Working | Molten, Cruising, Pouring | In progress, Processing |
| Waiting on a person | Needs a human, Standing by, Blocked | Action required |
| Degraded | Needs a look | Warning |
| Failed | Failed | — |
| Done | Done, Shipped | Completed successfully |
| Empty | Nothing molten yet | No items to display |
Blocked is the channel’s and the run node’s form of waiting on a person; Needs a human and Standing by are the agent’s and the task’s. Failed carries the number of attempts beside it on a run node. The agent roster is the one place with words of its own: an agent’s row reads Paused while it waits on a person and Idle while it watches for work.
Running work on a task board is labelled Molten rather than “in progress”, and the one running node in the Flow surface carries the same word. A channel that has never been used shows Nothing molten yet with what the channel is for, what happens next, and which agents are standing by — never a blank pane.
The channel status chip
The channel header carries the channel’s own state beside its task count, as a short chip: In review while a proposed change waits on a person, and Cruising · 2 running while automation is live, the count being that channel’s own. The chip answers what this channel is doing without opening anything.
The signal dial
The signal dial sets how much of the priority ladder a channel shows.
| Level | What it shows |
|---|---|
| People | Messages from people, and what is blocking |
| Decisions | The above, plus decisions |
| Digest | The above, plus updates, with runs of them folded |
| Firehose | Everything, including agent chatter |
Whatever a level suppresses is compressed rather than dropped, and the channel’s own settings count what has been folded under Volume.
Failure and its words
An error says what the machine did and what happens next, in the same vocabulary:
Lost the link to us-east-1-prod · the machine dropped off mid-pour. Retrying.
The status chip on that notification still comes from the lexicon above, so the tone never costs a reader the state.