Every named thing, once On the landing page Inside the line Inside a task Around the line
Vocabulary
Continuum names its parts. The landing page uses eight of them; the rest live here.
- signal
- A raw piece of demand: a Slack thread, a meeting note, an alert, an idea on the way out the door. It carries no obligation when captured.
- brief
- A task specification a competent stranger could execute: what is asked, acceptance criteria, dependency order, workflow mode.
- the line
- The whole path from a captured signal to verified delivery: capture, refine, briefs, queue, implement, verify. One line per signal.
- queue
- Work waiting to run, with priorities and dependencies, resolved in topological order under a WIP limit you set.
- NEEDS YOU
- The short list of decisions that cross to a human: a product or scope call, a fact only you know, an outward-facing effect.
- receipt
- The record of a decision taken in your name: the action, the object, the criterion used, and a deep link that reopens the exact session.
- verified
- Done as read off the remote ref, never the local checkout, headed by the sha and when it was read. An unreadable check reports as a gap, not a zero.
- ledger
- The per-task record of cost and turns per session, per mode. Recorded, not estimated.
- refinery
- The interactive stage where a signal becomes findings, findings become decisions, and decisions become briefs, with adversarial lenses applied while it can still fix what it wrote.
- lenses
- Adversarial checks run over the refinery's own output before briefs are egested: scope, granularity, dependency, testability.
- egest
- The refinery's last step: writing briefs out as files for the orchestration plane.
- prepare governor
- The process that drives the prepare domain: capture through briefs, escalating only NEEDS YOU decisions.
- regent
- The supervisor process that orchestrates intake, refiner, instrument and the runner; arbitrates routine calls with a recorded rationale; computes the delivery scoreboard.
- arbitrate
- What regent does with everything that is not NEEDS YOU: decide, record the criterion, leave a receipt.
- scoreboard
- The delivery verdict per task, computed against the remote: delivered, delivered-something-else, or unreadable (a gap).
- mode
- One of the named phases a task moves through: EXPLORING, RESEARCHING, PLANNING, IMPLEMENTING, VALIDATING, FINALIZING.
- gate
- The artifact on disk that must exist before the next mode opens: exploration.md opens RESEARCHING, research.md opens PLANNING, plan.md and todo.md open IMPLEMENTING, validation.md opens VALIDATING.
- session
- One bounded run of an agent inside a mode. Disposable by design; the task is not.
- hook
- Deterministic steps around a session: rebase before, commit and push after, state written back to task.yaml.
- worktree
- The isolated git checkout a task runs in, one per task branch.
- task.yaml
- The execution ledger for one task: mode, branch, sessions with turns and cost.
- plane
- One of three layers: the context plane refines demand into briefs, the orchestration plane executes tasks through gated modes, the substrate is where execution happens.
- substrate
- A place where execution happens: a laptop, a node, a rented GPU. Continuum runs on substrates; macOS is one substrate and one viewport.
- gradient
- A Claude Code plugin carrying behavioral or code standards: arché, shodo, kinhin, zazen. Open source.
- Intent Distill
- The desktop surface that shows the line: one row per signal, capture through verified, with the NEEDS YOU queue and receipts.
- Intent Engineering
- The discipline of the layer above the editor: turning raw demand into executable briefs and verifying what came back. Continuum is its workstation.