Glossary¶
The vocabulary SYNAPSE uses, in one place. Terms cross-reference each other in bold.
Hub¶
The single SynapseHub process. It owns all shared state — the roster, claims, the
blackboard, capability cards, chat, and the event log — and relays every message to
every connected client. It is the authoritative source of truth; there is one per channel.
Agent¶
Any client connected to the hub under a name: a coding agent, a human at a syn prompt, a
worker, a supervisor, or a presence holder. An agent's name may be a bare project
(quantum) or a project/id seat.
Worker¶
An agent that answers chat on the channel through a model backend (an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, a local Ollama server, or a deterministic rule fallback). It advertises a capability card and throttles its own replies.
Supervisor¶
An LLM-free agent that watches the blackboard and re-offers a task that has stalled, so work does not stick on an idle claim.
Claim¶
A lease an agent takes on a unit of work before doing it, carrying a scope, a status, an epoch, and an optional checkpoint. The hub refuses a claim whose scope overlaps a live one, so two agents never work the same files.
Lease¶
The time-bounded nature of a claim: it has a TTL, can be renewed, and is released explicitly or by an auto-release rule (for example a git hook on commit). A lapsed lease frees the work for another agent.
Scope¶
The set of path globs a claim covers. Scopes are opaque strings the hub compares only for glob overlap — the hub never reads a filesystem, so a scope coordinates intent, not disk access.
Epoch¶
A monotonically increasing number on a claim that makes reconnect-safe idempotency possible: a stale, replayed operation carrying an old epoch is ignored, so a redelivered claim or release does not double-apply.
Checkpoint¶
A small resume marker an agent attaches to its claim to record progress, so a returning
agent (or one reading synapse state) can see where the work was left and continue rather than
restart.
Blackboard¶
The shared task plan: declared tasks, their status, dependencies, the set that is
ready (unblocked), and recent progress notes. Printed by synapse board.
Task¶
A unit of declared work on the blackboard with an id, a title, a typed status lifecycle, and optional dependencies. A task marked done unblocks its dependents.
Capability (card)¶
A worker's self-description — its task classes, model, and a short description —
advertised to the channel and printed by synapse manifest, used to route a request to a
fitting worker.
Task class¶
A routing label a worker advertises (for example chat, reason, heavy). A request is
matched to a worker by class; a tiered worker uses the class to pick a cheap or a heavy
backend.
Presence¶
The fact of being on the hub's live roster. A presence holder is a long-lived listen
connection that keeps an identity reachable and the durable feed flowing even when the agent
itself is between turns. Printed by synapse who.
Wake / waiter¶
A waiter is a one-shot synapse wait an agent arms in the background; it blocks until a
message that should wake it arrives, then exits and re-invokes the agent. This is the
event-driven alternative to polling.
Directed-only¶
A waiter mode (--directed-only) that wakes only on a message addressed to the agent (or a
group glob it is in), a CEO message, or a --priority message — suppressing routine broadcasts
to all. The inbox still receives everything; directed-only governs only what wakes you.
Takeover¶
A re-arming waiter reclaiming its own name, evicting a stale ghost connection holding it, instead of failing with a name conflict.
Broadcast / directed message¶
A broadcast targets all; a directed message names a recipient — an agent, a
comma-list, or a group glob (project/*). A seat is reached by its project/seat name; the
bare project reaches a sole agent's inbox and, when armed bare, wakes it.
Relay (log)¶
A compact NDJSON mirror of the channel the hub can write with --relay-log, for a
file-based observer. synapse relay decodes it back to readable lines.
Ingest¶
Streaming durable events from the hub's event log since a sequence cursor
(synapse ingest) — the read side a persistent-memory adapter consumes.
Event log¶
The durable, append-only SQLite-WAL record of everything authoritative (claims, releases, plan
writes, findings), enabled with synapse hub --db …. It is replayed on restart to resume state
and is the spine for ingest.
Temporal event-log query¶
Read-only reconstruction over the event log using synapse event-query: task
timelines, task state at a sequence or timestamp, path-touch windows, and
historical claim conflicts.
Replayable postmortem¶
Read-only Markdown or JSON reconstruction over the event log using
synapse postmortem ./synapse.db TASK-1. It lists the task timeline, owners,
release events, assessment evidence, reconstructed path-overlap conflicts, and
candidate unanswered messages that mention the task id.
Reliability memory¶
Evidence-only owner summaries over the event log using
synapse reliability ./synapse.db. The report counts stale claims, declared
failed-check evidence, broken handoff candidates, and conflict pairs as audit
signals, not scores.
TTL advice¶
Read-only adaptive lease TTL advice over the event log using
synapse ttl-advice ./synapse.db. It derives completed-task duration samples and
live-claim load, then reports advisory defaults without changing hub settings;
manual TTL values remain authoritative.
Predictive stall detection¶
The local synapse supervisor policy that combines a fixed idle ceiling with
completed-task progress cadence from the current board. It can re-offer stalled
plan tasks earlier on boards with enough fast history, but remains an advisory
heuristic over board activity, not proof that a worker failed.
Handoff¶
One agent passing an in-progress claim (with its checkpoint) to another atomically, so work moves between agents without dropping the lease.