wahidyankf Shared Repository Vocabulary
Delegated agents do not inherit the canonical instruction file, so this Skill is how the shared vocabulary reaches them. It carries operative meanings only; where it and the glossary differ, the glossary wins.
Most scope disputes are vocabulary disputes in disguise: two readers who disagree about whether a rule applies usually agree on the rule and disagree on one word in it.
The terms
- Repo rules — every surface that binds how work happens, wherever it sits. Not a synonym for one directory: governance prose, the root instruction surfaces, agent and skill definitions, generated mirrors, the config's machine-readable declarations, the hooks and pipeline jobs enforcing them, and the language style guides. A sweep scoped to one tree skips most of it. The test for anything unlisted: editing it changes what someone is required to do, and that requirement outlives the work that prompted it. Declarations bind; the code enforcing them is an application, reviewed as product code. See Repo Rules — Scope Boundaries and Membership Test.
- Content trees — four trees differing by who is bound and for how long, not by subject: one describes the product, one binds contributors, one holds work that expires, one holds acceptance criteria. See Content Trees.
- Delivery unit — the unit a branch and a PR map to: a contiguous run of phases that ships on its own. A phase is smaller, and mapping a PR to a phase is the common error. See Plan Vocabulary.
- Surface and binding — a surface is the file class a gate measures; a binding is the harness-specific configuration, one hand-authored and the rest generated. "Autoloaded" is narrow — a link inside an autoloaded file is not itself autoloaded. See Governance Surfaces.
- Agent, skill, gate, workflow — distinguished by what holds the knowledge and who decides when it runs. See Agent Vocabulary.
Related Skills
repo-understanding-repository-architecture— orthogonal: that Skill covers how the six governance layers relate, this one what individual terms cover. Consult both when placing a new document.
Note: the governance glossary is the source of truth; this Skill is its delivery vehicle for delegated agents.