Glossary

May 9, 2026 · View on GitHub

Standalone glossary of Foundry terminology, mirrored from spec.md §2. For readers who want only the vocabulary.

If this glossary disagrees with spec.md, the spec wins; this file is updated.

A condensed quick-card version (one row per term, fewer terms) is at docs/reference/terminology-quick-card.md.

Term	Definition
Target	The software under evaluation: its source code, and optionally a running deployment of it (the testbed).
Testbed	A running instance of the target that agents may probe and exploit. May be absent.
Operator	The human who configures, starts, steers, and stops an evaluation.
Evaluation goals	The operator's written statement of what outcomes matter (e.g. "authentication bypass", "RCE on the control plane") and what is in scope to test.
Agent	An LLM-backed worker with a defined role, running in a loop, coordinating with peers via the shared substrate.
Role	A named agent specialization (Detector, Triager, etc.). One role may have many concurrent instances.
Fleet	All agent instances currently running for one evaluation.
Finding	A claimed vulnerability at any lifecycle stage, from "candidate" through "confirmed and reported".
Candidate	A finding that has been detected but not yet investigated.
Verdict	The Triager's classification of a candidate: `true-positive`, `false-positive`, `needs-review`, `not-applicable`, or `code-quality`.
Evidence gate	The structural requirement a finding must satisfy before it may be classified `true-positive`. See `spec.md` §7.3.
Exploited	A `true-positive` finding whose headline impact has been independently reproduced against the testbed by a clean-room check. See `spec.md` §7.4.
Fingerprint	A stable identifier for a finding, used for deduplication across runs. See `spec.md` §7.5.
Finding report	The human-readable writeup of a confirmed finding: description, impact, reproduction, severity, classification.
Security map	The Cartographer's output: architecture overview, attack-surface enumeration, trust-boundary map, data-flow description, threat model.
Detection rule	A reusable, versioned check for one vulnerability class, applied by the Detector to each function in scope. The rule corpus is an artifact independent of the agent code.
Rule-gap	A record that an exploratory finding was confirmed `true-positive` and no detection rule would have produced it; the input to growing the rule corpus. See FR-042.
Coverage	The degree to which the evaluation goals have been credibly attempted.
Yield	Severity-weighted confirmed findings per unit of spend, measured over a trailing window.
Work queue	The shared, ordered list of tasks agents claim from. See `spec.md` §8.
Finding store	The durable, fingerprint-indexed record of every finding at every lifecycle stage; internal, queryable by every role. Distinct from the issue tracker.
Coverage log	The append-only record of which (area × technique) pairs the fleet has attempted; an audit trail, not a stop-list. See FR-046.
Budget governor	The substrate component that tracks spend, runtime, and trailing yield against operator caps and signals the Orchestrator to halt. See `spec.md` §9.3–§9.4.
Help request	An operator-filed issue asking the fleet to perform a specific action; resolved by the Orchestrator's conversational facet. See FR-015.
Operator message	An agent-authored, asynchronous, one-way note to the operator (blocker, request, feedback, or informational), deduplicated across the fleet. The agent→operator counterpart of a help request. See FR-102a.
Proof-of-concept (PoC)	A self-contained, runnable artifact that demonstrates a finding's headline impact against the testbed. See FR-063.
Claim	An agent's exclusive, crash-safe hold on a unit of work (a task, a finding, a target file).
Substrate	The non-agent machinery every role depends on: work queue, finding store, sandbox, budget tracker, dashboard.
Index	The structured representation of the target's source: symbols, call graph, cross-references, embeddings.
Sandbox	The isolation boundary around the agent fleet that constrains what it can reach and modify.

See also