Glossary

Canonical definitions of Stella Loop vocabulary. Domain nouns are capitalized as proper concepts in product copy (North Star, Intent, Epic, Proposal Pool, Candidate).

Analyzer — a unit of analysis, agentic or deterministic under one manifest, that examines the codebase and produces a report, usually with a score. Authored three ways: repo config files, an in-app builder, or the shared registry where the built-in suite ships. See Analysis.

Approval request — the record created when a checkpoint gate holds a transition for a decision; actionable in-app, over the API, and via stella approve <id>.

Autonomy dial — the project-level setting — supervised, balanced, autonomous — that configures every checkpoint gate at once; any per-gate override moves it to custom. See The loop engine.

Budget — a spend control at one of three grains: per project period, per loop iteration, or per epic tournament; each with a warn threshold and a hard stop, with no silent tier downgrades.

Candidate — one competing solution inside an epic: its own spec and its own branch-set. In a tournament, candidates race to be the merged winner. See Epics and tasks.

Change set — the coordinated multi-repo unit for a candidate: one same-named branch and one pull request per repository in scope, reviewed as one and merged as one ordered operation. See GitHub integration.

Checkpoint (gate) — a policy point evaluated on a stage transition, returning proceed, hold (approval pending), or deny. Three modes: require approval, approve by default, autonomous.

Connector — an organization-level integration that turns external events into signals: GitHub Issues, Slack, Sentry, inbound email, and generic signed webhooks. See Signal connectors.

Demand cluster — merged duplicate signals accumulating a demand count; the weight behind “eleven people asked for this”.

Display ID — the human-readable identifier per entity kind: SIG-n (org-scoped), INT-n, RPT-n, PRP-n, EPC-n, TSK-n (per-project). See Provenance.

Epic — the committed unit of delivery work, created only by promotion from the pool; it owns the spec, tasks, implementation, and review, and carries the full provenance chain.

Fix loop — the Review → Implement loop-back: review findings send work back to implementation without reopening the spec.

Intent — the statement of aim that starts a loop turn; it names the aim and scopes the analyzers. Archetypes: directed and North Star-driven. See Intents.

Learnings — structured records captured when a candidate loses, an epic is cancelled or completes: what was tried, why it ended that way, insights worth keeping. Learnings can seed future intents.

Loop iteration — one numbered turn of the outer loop (“loop 12”), closed with a summary: score delta, epics shipped, learnings seeded, spend.

Model tier — the strength class a stage requests — frontier, standard, economy — resolved to a concrete model by project configuration.

North Star constellation — the full set of active North Star documents: the composite aim, with per-document weights feeding the composite score. See North Star.

North Star document — a single versioned document of tenets, typed by concern (product, design, engineering, agent experience, or custom).

Promotion — the commitment point: moving a proposal or sibling set out of the pool, which atomically creates the epic. Modes: prune-first and tournament.

Proposal — a candidate piece of work derived from analysis (PRP-n): problem, approach, trade-offs, estimated scope and impact — always anchored to a source report.

Proposal pool — the prioritized queue of sibling sets, ordered by priority bands with dependencies; the junction between discovery and delivery. See Proposal pool.

Provenance chain — the mandatory immutable chain epic → proposal → report → intent, extended by signals to the external source. See Provenance.

Report — the output of an analyzer run (RPT-n): findings with severity and code references, per-area scores, a markdown body. Reports are project-level, reusable assets.

Re-spec — the Review → Plan loop-back: findings escalate past a fix and reopen the candidate’s spec as a new revision.

Score — a 0–100 integer quality measure at project, area, and document grain; every score permanently records the analyzer version, rubric version, and model that produced it.

Seed intent — a draft intent created from review learnings, findings, or a triaged signal, carrying seed provenance and entering the normal approval gate.

Sibling set — proposals that are alternative solutions to the same problem; independents are sets of one. The unit the pool orders, prunes, and promotes.

Signal — an uninterpreted observation from a person or connected system (SIG-n), captured with no required structure and triaged later. See Signals.

Signal triage — assigning a signal its altitude: seed a draft intent, attach as evidence, merge as duplicate, or dismiss with a reason.

Spec — the planned design for an epic candidate, produced by a pluggable spec tool — OpenSpec by default. See Plan.

Standing intent — an intent with re-fire triggers (manual, schedule, post-merge, score-drop) that re-arms after each run; what makes the outer loop continuous.

Task — an implementable unit derived from a spec (TSK-n), executed by agents or humans with race-safe claiming. States: todo, claimed, in progress, blocked, in review, done, reopened.

Tension — a first-class record that two North Star documents pull in opposite directions, with an open → acknowledged → resolved lifecycle.

Tournament — the promotion mode where a whole sibling set becomes one epic with one candidate per sibling, implemented in parallel, with review selecting the winner.

Work unit — the engine’s registry entry for a running piece of model-backed work; the basis for tier resolution, cost capture, and the live “N agents working” count.