Glossary

How to use this page

This glossary is the A-Z reference. One term, one sentence, one pointer. If you want the full story for any term, follow the link. The terms here are the product nouns — the words that show up on the screen, in tickets, and in conversation about Ship. We do not define library or protocol names; those are not part of the vocabulary the operator should have to learn.

Action

A single recorded entry in the audit log — actor, time, target, payload. Action names like pipeline_run.claim are lowercase, dot-namespaced, and grep-friendly on purpose.

Activation

The per-repo decision that lets Ship act on a connected repository — comment on PRs, mirror knowledge, fire routines.

Admin

Workspace role that can manage members and settings but cannot promote owners or delete the workspace.

Agent

A specialist that does a piece of work on behalf of your team — implements a ticket, reviews a PR, audits the repo, writes a knowledge draft. Bounded, scheduled, instructed by versioned artifacts.

Agent rule file

A versioned set of instructions installed at canonical paths each agent reads — files like CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, or .cursor/rules/*.mdc.

API token

A workspace-minted credential that authenticates a CLI or a CI job into Ship. Minted at /settings, never committed to git.

Approval

An item that requires explicit human sign-off before something irreversible happens. Dispositioned at the Console /approve/{id} page or via the inbox_* MCP tools (approvals require an approval_echo of the item's exact title). Destructive approvals are web-only — they cannot be approved over MCP and link out to /approve/{id}.

Article

A single page of knowledge. One topic, one owner, plain prose. The unit Ship publishes, supersedes, and archives.

Artifact

A versioned unit in the catalog — pattern, tool, collection, or preset. The thing your team's agents read when they work.

Audit log

The workspace-wide record of every privileged action. Owner- and admin-visible. Read the page.

Bucket

A named container for related articles. The unit of grouping in knowledge — one topic, one owner, scoped to workspace, project, repo, or user. Read the page.

Bundle

The set of artifacts a repo currently has installed. The workspace home flags out-of-date bundles.

Claim

When a routine takes ownership of a scheduled run window. Recorded in the audit log as pipeline_run.claim.

Clarification

An Inbox item kind — a question a routine needs answered before it can continue.

Connected repo

A repository that has been activated in the workspace, can be acted on by routines, and mirrors knowledge through .ship/.

Decision

A recorded answer to a clarification or approval. Stored on the inbox item, surfaced in the audit log, available to agents on the next run.

Disposition

What you do with a draft, an Inbox item, or a finding — publish, supersede, archive, send back, approve, reject. Every Ship surface that produces work has a small fixed set of dispositions.

Distiller

The system that turns raw imported text into a draft article — picks a topic, nominates a bucket, writes the article, and stops for review. Read the page.

DORA

The four metrics — deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, mean time to recovery — that have been the industry's reference standard for software delivery performance for over a decade. Ship does not render a built-in DORA page; see the concepts note for how to read them against your run and PR data.

Draft

An article, a feedback note, or an Inbox item that has not yet been published or submitted. Visible to its author and reviewers, invisible to agents.

Evidence

A pointer an angry auditor can follow — an advisory ID in a commit message, a workflow URL in a ticket comment, a citation that walks back to a specific article. Evidence is not a tone; it is a link.

Feedback

A structured note attached to an artifact saying "this needs to change." Drafted locally, submitted through the CLI, opened as a tracked issue against the artifact's owners.

Inbox

The set of items that need a human — approvals and clarifications. There is no Inbox mailbox page in the Console (removed in the MCP-edge rework); operators handle items through the inbox_* MCP tools and the /approve/{id} approval page.

Knowledge

The single, reviewable place where standing facts live — buckets of articles your team and your agents read from the same page. Read the page.

Lane

A class of work routed by FSM stage rather than a standing cron queue. Since the "lanes as config" change (E16), routines dispatch per stage off tracker events; the old Ship-side per-lane scheduler was retired. Process = states + routines + specialists, edited in the Process editor.

Lead time

The time from "work started on this" to "the customer can use it." One of the four DORA metrics.

Live system

Earlier Ship builds rendered a workspace-health panel by this name; it was removed in the MCP-edge rework. The current product exposes live state via the home dashboard priorities feed and the dashboard_get MCP tool. There is no Live system page.

MTTR

Mean time to recovery — how long it takes to fix a change that went wrong. One of the four DORA metrics.

Owner

Workspace role with full administrative authority. Can promote admins, transfer ownership, and delete the workspace.

Pattern

A type of artifact — a reusable procedure or prompt body that defines what a specialist does.

Pipeline

A scheduled sequence of work — the running form of a routine that has claimed its window.

Policy

A rule that constrains how routines and agents may act — what they may touch, when they may act, what they must record. Lives in .ship/ and is reviewed like code.

Preset

A bundled starting configuration for a known stack — web-app, api-backend, mobile-app. Installed at shipctl init time.

Project

A grouping inside the workspace, usually corresponding to one product or one team. Used to scope buckets, routines, and tracker queries.

Publish

The review action that makes a draft article available to agents and citations.

Retro

The daily retrospective routine. Reads the last twenty-four hours of runs and surfaces lanes that produced no movement.

Routine

A unit of recurring work bound to a process state. Most routines fire when the tracker FSM enters their stage (event-driven, via the tracker poller); some are time-scheduled (e.g. the nightly knowledge refresh). Defined in the Process editor / .ship config and executed by the workspace.

Run

One execution of a routine. Recorded in the audit log, surfaced on the live-system panel, and tied to the tickets it touched.

Scope

Which slice of the workspace a thing applies to — workspace, project, repo, or user. Buckets, knowledge, and many policies are scoped.

Source

A place Ship pulls knowledge from on a schedule — a docs repo, a web page, an upload, a .ship/knowledge/ file. Read the page.

Specialist

The role a routine takes when it runs — planner, developer, validator, self-heal, daily retro, security auditor. One specialist per slot.

Stage

A named position in the ticket FSM — planning (a single bundle: intake + BA + tech + QA-arch), dev_implementation (or devops_implementation for infra), validation, code_review, auto_merge, then Done. Project decomposition runs as its own bundle stage. Linear state transitions drive the engine between stages.

Stuck work

A ticket that has not moved in long enough to need attention. Surfaced by the daily retro queue.

Supersede

The review action that replaces an existing article with a new one while keeping both readable for the history.

Token

Either an API token or an integration credential. Both are recorded when minted and when rotated.

Workspace

The top-level container — your company's instance of Ship. Holds projects, repos, knowledge, members, routines, and the audit log.