Workspai Glossary

Short definitions for terms used by the CLI, its reports, IDE integrations, CI workflows, and AI consumers.

Core concepts

Term	Plain-language meaning
Workspace	A governed collection of one or more registered projects. It is not required to be a Git monorepo.
Project	One registered application, service, library, or infrastructure unit inside or linked to a workspace.
Workspace manifest	.workspai/workspace.json; workspace identity, profile, engine, and bootstrap metadata. It is not the project registry.
Workspace contract	.workspai/workspace.contract.json; the operational registry of projects and their declared ports, APIs, ownership, and relationships.
Registry summary	.workspai/workspace-registry.v1.json; the canonical lightweight project count and registry status for UI and CI.
Workspace Model	The canonical, deterministic structural description produced from registered projects, manifests, contracts, policies, and detected facts.
Knowledge Graph	A proof-backed representation derived from and structurally bound to the canonical Workspace Model. It makes entities and relationships queryable; it cannot replace or mutate the authorizing model.
Structural model hash	A stable SHA-256 over model structure. Volatile timestamps, run correlation, live evidence references, and freshness fields are excluded so harmless refreshes do not create false graph drift.
Dependency graph	The project-to-project dependency subgraph embedded in the Workspace Model and used by impact and verification.
Provider	A deterministic source adapter that emits facts from code, manifests, APIs, infrastructure, documentation, Git, or another supported source.
Fact	A normalized observation about the workspace, such as a package, endpoint, import, deployment, or owner.
Evidence / proof	The source location and extraction details that justify a fact or relationship.
Proof path	A traceable route from a query result or relationship back to its supporting evidence.
Artifact	A versioned file written under .workspai/, usually .workspai/reports/, for people or automation to consume.
Command projection	The JSON returned on stdout for one command. It can include status and output metadata around a canonical artifact payload.

Intelligence and governance

Term	Plain-language meaning
Unified runner	workspace intelligence run; the supported way to execute the complete intelligence chain in contract order.
Preflight	sync and baseline resolution. These prepare the run but are not stages in the 11-stage intelligence chain.
Stage	One contract-defined operation in the intelligence chain. Stage order comes from workspace-intelligence-chain.v1.json.
Gate	A decision that can pass, need attention, or block automation according to evidence and policy.
Blocked	The command completed, but evidence or policy prevents the requested release/action. The unified runner uses exit code 2.
Failed	Execution itself failed. The unified runner uses exit code 1.
Needs attention	Evidence is usable but contains warnings or non-blocking gaps. Strict policy can promote it to a blocking result.
Fresh / stale	Whether an artifact still matches its governed inputs and dependency closure. A recent timestamp alone does not prove freshness.
Snapshot	A stable baseline of the model used for later comparison.
Diff	The structural change between the current model and a baseline model or snapshot.
Impact	Direct and transitive consequences of a model diff, including verification scope and risk.
Verify	The evidence-backed gate over the affected dependency subgraph and workspace policies.
Context	A bounded, agent-oriented projection of current workspace evidence.
Agent sync	Generation of tool-specific instructions, skills, prompts, indexes, and MCP metadata from canonical evidence.
Evaluation	A provenance-aware record of model calls, tool activity, cost, latency, and verified task outcome produced by workspace eval.
Verified outcome	A task result supported by the workspace verification path; smaller context alone is not treated as task success.

AI and integration

Term	Plain-language meaning
Agent grounding	Instructions and evidence references that keep an AI agent inside the correct workspace, contracts, and command loop.
Canonical-first entry	A host-discovered project protocol that validates Workspai identity, evidence, freshness, and Goal bindings before broad source discovery.
Agent bootstrap receipt	A portable per-session result proving which entry and evidence checks passed, degraded, or blocked; it does not prove model compliance.
Bounded retrieval	Returning only the most relevant entities and proof paths for a question instead of injecting the complete graph or model.
Retrieval benchmark	A deterministic comparison of readable proof-source corpus size with one bounded graph response; it is not billing evidence.
Token provenance	Whether a token value was provider-reported, counted by a named tokenizer, estimated, or unavailable.
MCP	Model Context Protocol; Workspai exposes read-oriented workspace tools through workspace mcp serve.
Module recommender	The optional embedding-based FastAPI/NestJS recommendation feature. It is separate from deterministic Workspace Intelligence.
Canonical path	The current .workspai path that new writers and consumers should prefer.
Legacy path	A .rapidkit compatibility path read for older workspaces; it is not the target for new integrations.

Where to continue

• Run the full loop: Unified Workspace Intelligence Runner
• Query evidence: Workspace Knowledge Graph
• Ground an agent: Canonical-first agent entry
• Find an output: Artifact Catalog
• Look up syntax: Command Reference