---
title: "Glossary"
description: "Plain definitions of the terms these docs use, and the facet values every page is tagged with."
url: "https://docs.octo.ad/reference/glossary/"
id: "reference/glossary"
type: "reference"
audience: "operator"
dateModified: "2026-11-06"
keywords: ["glossary", "terms"]
---

# Glossary

> Plain definitions of the terms these docs use, and the facet values every page is tagged with.

## Page facets

Every page is tagged with these values, so a reader or an agent can filter pages by them.

### Facet: Audience

- operator
- team lead
- admin
- developer
- tenant admin

### Facet: Surface

- the Desk
- Slack
- meetings
- email
- phone and MCP

### Facet: Ladder rung

- rule
- replay
- local judge
- frontier model
- person

### Facet: Product area

- company memory
- the decision record
- the decision ladder
- the Desk
- ingestion
- agents at work
- a copy for every team
- integrations

### Facet: Tenancy scope

- platform
- team copy

**Harness**: Everything around a model that makes it dependable at work: memory, checked context, a record of decisions, and bounds on what agents may do. The model is the engine; OCTOPUS is the harness.

**Context graph**: What the organization knows, kept as typed, linked facts about people, organizations, products and events, so relationships are kept rather than cut into text chunks.

**Schema-validated context**: Context that is checked against an explicit shape before any model sees it.

**Decision record**: The written record of a decision: the options, the reasoning, who made it, when, and what they chose, readable later.

**Decision ladder**: The order in which a decision is answered: an agreed rule, a past decision, a smaller model, a large model, or a person.

**The Desk**: The place, phone first, where a person makes the decisions and approvals that belong to a person.

**Team's copy**: A separate copy that holds only one team's material, kept apart by architecture, not by policy.

**Closure on evidence**: A task is done only when the effect is seen to have landed, not when the agent says so.

**Lane**: One stream of agent work, with its own scope and its own level of autonomy.

**Shadow**: A way to run new automation that records what it would have done and does nothing outside.

**Kill switch**: A single control that stops one new behavior.

**Held**: The state of a lane that was braked on purpose.

**Unknown**: The state shown when a signal cannot be read. It is never shown as healthy.

**Concierge**: The public assistant on octo.ad, also reachable over MCP as ask_octopus, that answers from public material.

**Markdown twin**: The plain markdown copy of a docs page, at the same address ending in .md.