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 the family names help you find a term before you know its name.
| 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 for relaying conversation between platforms. Bridge setup for Slack and Microsoft Teams is unavailable in the application. A bridge is separate from the provider behind a surface.
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 underlying type of a channel. Its kind determines which surfaces are available. Creating a channel does not automatically add a team of agents. The channel preview shows the configuration before creation.
compute provider
The service that supplies machines for workspace work. A compute provider is separate from a surface provider. General compute-provider setup controls are unavailable in settings.
connected
A mode in which an external tool supplies the data or service behind a surface. That tool can remain authoritative while the application stores connection information and cached responses.
conversation
The transcript of a channel, and the thing every surface answers to. It carries the decisions, the work and its reasons, in the order it happened.
cordon
A state that an agent profile can report. The profile provides no cordon control. Stop on a running reply is a separate action that interrupts that reply when you have permission.
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
The proposed ability to change the provider behind a surface. General surface-provider switching is unavailable. Disconnecting an App changes access; it leaves records in their current tool.
instance
One running copy of an agent. A profile can lack instance and usage data. An empty instance list does not establish that the agent has never run.
MCP
Model Context Protocol, a protocol for connecting tools. The application has no general MCP connection form. A tool reference states whether setup is available.
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
A request for a person to decide a proposed operation. The card displays the question and available options. Access to the conversation does not by itself grant permission to approve the operation.
priority
The rank attached to a message. Priority can affect attention and filtering. States and priorities lists its values.
project
A grouping of work. The Project surface displays the files mounted for the selected channel; its name does not establish a separate membership or administration control.
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
Your attention preference for one channel. Its visible levels are Everything, Mentions, Decisions and Muted. Notify me about in Channel settings changes this preference. Email and push delivery preferences remain separate.
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 place in Crusible. Membership controls access to its work. Organisation permissions and access to individual channels apply separately.
worktree
A checkout with its own working files. Project shows the files mounted for the selected channel. Opening another channel does not move unsaved edits into that checkout.