Glossary#
What this is for: defining every term Estate Agent uses, including the ones the rest of the industry uses carelessly. No prior knowledge assumed.
Agent — an AI assistant that can act, not just answer: read files, run commands, edit code, open pull requests. Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot's agent mode and Gemini CLI are all agents. The distinction from a chatbot matters, because an agent can do damage.
AEO — answer engine optimisation. Being the source an AI cites when somebody asks it a question, in the way SEO is about being the link a search engine returns.
Blast radius — everything that breaks if you change one thing. estate impact computes it. See also expand and contract.
Catch-all route — a route like /{full_path:path} that matches every request. Estate Agent ignores these when identifying services, because a repo with one would otherwise appear to own every path in the estate.
Client app — an app your users install: iOS, tvOS, Android, Roku, or a web front end. Treated specially throughout, because it cannot be rolled forward — see ship cost.
Confirm list — the "Needs confirming" section of ESTATE.md: connections that could plausibly point at two services. Estate Agent asks rather than guesses. Answering one is permanent.
Context file — a file an AI assistant reads automatically to learn how to work in a repo. Each assistant wants its own: CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, .cursor/rules/, .github/copilot-instructions.md, GEMINI.md. Estate Agent generates all five from the deed so you never hand-maintain them.
Deed — .agent/estate.yaml, the one file per repo that everything else is generated from. Named after the legal document because it is short, authoritative, and someone signs it.
Drift — when a generated file no longer matches the deed it came from. estate check fails on it. Distinguished carefully from a hand edit.
Estate — all your repos, taken together. The thing no single agent session can see, and the reason this project exists.
Evidence — the exact file and line proving a connection is real, recorded on every edge of the map. If there is no evidence, there is no edge.
Expand and contract — the safe way to change a shared API: add the new shape, migrate every caller, and only then remove the old shape. Estate Agent's landing order is this pattern applied to your actual dependency graph.
Hand edit — a change someone made directly to a generated file. Estate Agent detects it and refuses to overwrite it, offering to move it into the deed instead. See self-healing.
Hook — a script an assistant runs automatically at a defined moment. Estate Agent's secret guard is a hook that runs before every tool call and can block it.
Infrastructure — a shared cluster, cache, database or queue. Two services join the same node only when they name the same host or declared resource; a container image in one repo's compose file is local development, not a shared production cluster.
Level — how far you have adopted, from 0 (nothing) to 4 (it stays true on its own). Not to be confused with a tier: a level describes your adoption, a tier describes what one repo lets an agent do. See the five levels.
MCP — Model Context Protocol, a standard way to give an assistant access to an external tool or data source. Estate Agent does not require any MCP server; some optional level-3 tools use one.
Monorepo — one repository containing many packages or services. Estate Agent handles nested deeds; see monorepos.
Permission profile — the deny/ask/allow rules in .claude/settings.json that stop an agent running irreversible commands. Estate Agent ships a reviewed baseline.
Provider / consumer — a service that exposes an endpoint, and a service that calls it. The map is built by matching one to the other.
Register — ESTATE.md, the human-readable listing of the whole estate.
Resolution ladder — how a connection was identified, ranked by trust: declared > dependency > env > host > path. Shown on every edge so you can weigh it.
Secret guard — the hook that blocks an agent from reading or writing credentials. Measured at 32/32 real credentials caught with 0 false positives on ordinary code.
Ship cost — how many release cycles you are committed to supporting an old API shape. Zero for a service you can redeploy; roughly two for a mobile or TV app that goes through store review and lingers on old versions. This is what drives the ordering in estate impact.
Stack — a language-plus-ecosystem: java, rust, react-web, roku-brightscript. Each is one YAML file in stacks/; adding a language means adding one file and no code.
Stack profile — that file. It holds detection rules, build and test commands, conventions, and the patterns for finding endpoints and call sites.
Tier — how much autonomy an agent gets in a repo: 1 restricted, 2 reviewed, 3 autonomous. Distinct from a level, which is how far you have adopted overall. See tiers.
Upkeep — estate upkeep, the self-healing command.
Vault — the estate written as linked markdown: estate vault. Generated notes under Generated/, human-authored ones (investigations, decisions, runbooks, concepts) in sibling trees that link into them. Readable in Obsidian, GitHub, rg, or by an agent.
Workspace — the directory holding your repos, the thing you point estate scan at.