Glossary

Ambient mode — a session in a DevFlow project with no skill currently running. gate-edits denies direct edits in this mode by default.

Atomic commit — one commit per task, carrying objective scope and task ID. Produced by df-tools commit, enforced by gate-commits.

Checkpoint — a formalised stop in an execution plan. Three types: human-verify, decision, human-action. Behaviour depends on mode.

Confidence tag — VERIFIED or SUSPECTED on every finding from codebase-mapper and security-auditor. Only VERIFIED findings are acted on downstream.

Context rot — the quality degradation that happens as a model fills its context window. The problem DevFlow’s whole architecture answers.

Decision queue — where checkpoint:decision is parked in autonomous mode instead of being guessed. Resolved with /devflow:decide.

Defaults table — the (kind, work) lookup that derives TDD posture, planning depth, model profile and verification rigor. Three tiers: project, org, bundled.

df-tools — the central CLI that skills and agents drive. Invoked from the runtime mirror at ~/.claude/devflow/bin/df-tools.cjs.

Gate — either a confirmation pause configured in config.json, or a hook that blocks a tool call outright. The two are different things.

Handoff — passing a TTY-bound or shell-environment-dependent command to your own shell, via the devflow-watch daemon or a printed ! cmd.

Intent model — the kind × work system that matches rigor to the work.

Job — an atomic unit of execution within an objective. One JOB.md, one executor, one SUMMARY.md, several atomic commits.

Kind — what sort of software the project is: api, app, library, ui-lib, cli, plugin. Declared once on PROJECT.md.

Marker — a dotfile in .planning/ that coordinates hooks. .skill-active and .edit-override are the two that matter.

Milestone — a set of objectives delivering a version’s requirements. Audited and archived as a unit.

Mode — interactive, yolo or autonomous. Governs checkpoint behaviour.

Objective — a numbered unit of work on the roadmap, with a goal and success criteria. What you pass to /devflow:build.

Profile — quality, balanced or budget. Maps each agent onto a model tier.

Provenance — metadata on every resolved intent field saying which level of the resolution chain supplied it.

Runtime mirror — ~/.claude/devflow/, a copy of the plugin’s devflow/ directory, refreshed at session start. Exists because @path references do not interpolate ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}.

Skill — a user-invocable slash command, /devflow:<name>. A thin orchestrator that loads state and dispatches agents.

Summary — SUMMARY.md, written by the executor when a job finishes. Its presence on disk is the signal that a job actually ran.

TRD — the technical requirements document for a job, carrying frontmatter that can override intent resolution at the highest precedence.

Wave — a group of jobs with no dependencies on each other, executed concurrently in separate context windows.

Work — what sort of change an objective is: feature, port, refactor, foundation, bugfix, prototype, spike. Declared per objective.

Workstream — a whole objective running in its own git worktree and branch, merged back when done.