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 REPOSITORY_RUN_CLAIM are short 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 Inbox item that requires explicit human sign-off before something irreversible happens.
Archive
The review action that removes an article from agent searches while keeping it readable. Used when a fact stops being true, not when it is replaced.
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 The workspace home flags out-of-date bundles.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 REPOSITORY_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 in the Inbox thread, 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. Read the page.
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 list of items that need a human — approvals, clarifications, escalations from the distiller, things a routine paused on.
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 with its own queue and its own cadence — a delivery lane, an audit lane, an intake lane. Lanes do not consume each other's queues.
Lead time
The time from "work started on this" to "the customer can use it." One of the four DORA metrics.
Live system
The block on the Analytics page showing real-time health — uptime, last run, failures, knowledge ingestion, active routines, daily retro queue, specialists.
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 scheduled job — the daily intake pass, the weekly QA sweep, the nightly knowledge refresh. Defined in .ship/config.yml, 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 position in the ticket workflow — picking, planning, executing, reviewing, done. Routines advance tickets 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.