Glossary
The terms I use across the essays and the tools, defined once so I do not have to redefine them in the middle of an argument.
The stage where a framework's original elegance disappears under accumulated workarounds and you spend more time running the system than working inside it.
A diagnostic that scores a productivity system on seven dimensions and tells you which two or three need attention.
A filing framework that keeps PARA's structure and adds an Operations layer for task management, knowledge curation and automation.
The practice of making your model of the work explicit before you reach for software.
The integration code between systems, which carries a team's real operating logic while nobody treats it as real work.
The automation layer in OPERA: the part that routes tasks to agents, curates the knowledge base and keeps a workflow continuous across tools.
A pass that cites a file and line, a command's output or a test name for every claim, and treats missing evidence as failure.
Acceptance tests written before implementation by a different agent, which the implementers must satisfy and may never edit.
Review agents label every finding high, medium or low confidence instead of withholding the uncertain ones, and the skill that called them decides what to act on.
The generated backlog view: one line per open work item, with a stable identity and either a breakdown link or a marker that it needs one.
A unit of work small enough for one agent session to finish: one to five files, clear acceptance criteria, one commit.
The set of task records under one work item, each self-contained enough to hand to an agent on its own.
The arrangement of session-flow's skills so that each stage produces the artifacts the next one consumes.
One dated entry per ended agent session: what was asked, what was done, the evidence for it, and what is still open.
An item the automation refuses to decide, written to a numbered file and surfaced for approval on the unit's pinned dashboard.
The cross-repo status rollup: backlog progress, inbox depth, open escalations, last release and activity, run quota and failure streak, for every managed unit.
A URL attached to a backlog line, meaning that this line and that external item are the same work.
The scheduled triage and sweep workflows on an enrolled unit, plus the guard that caps their cost and the heartbeat that reports their failure.
A repository that session-ops manages: one with a backlog, direction documents and an entry in the registry.
The seven members an adapter must implement to translate one harness's native transport into CEP's fourteen events.
In CEP, the shell is the desktop interface a person types into; the harness is the agent runtime that answers, running the loop and calling tools.
A capped restart schedule: five attempts at one, two, five, five and five seconds, then stop and say so.
Running Python as a separate child process that a desktop app watches and restarts, instead of embedding an interpreter in the binary.
In pmstate, the directory tree itself: each node owns a slice of state on disk, as an append-only event log or a JSON table.