Glossary

Seventeen words the other pages assume, two or three sentences each, then the file that defines the word properly. The seven primitives come first, in the order of meclaw.md.

colony, a folder, and the sole write authority: the registry, the routing, the templates, the lifecycle of cells and every mutation. Every cell registers with it directly, so routing is one lookup however deep the tree goes. meclaw-overview.md § Authority model.

cell, an actor: one task, one mailbox, one job, single-threaded on the inside. It knows its contract, its params and the message in front of it, never the sender, the receiver or another cell. meclaw-overview.md § Cell model.

hive, a directory whose config.json says type: "hive": an authority and mutation boundary with no task and no mailbox. A message aimed at one has the hive’s out-edges evaluated instead of being delivered. cell-types.md § hive, a scope marker and a transit node.

edge, a routing rule between two paths, and where the logic of a colony lives. Its condition is a CEL boolean deciding whether it is responsible, reading the headers and never the body; its modifier is the sole header authority. meclaw-overview.md § Edge model.

hop, the header compartment that lives for exactly one hop: the output of the cell that just emitted, refined by the edge the message travelled, replaced wholesale at the next emission. Its sibling context persists, so a value survives only if an edge promotes it. meclaw-overview.md § Headers and body, the write model.

mutation, a body POSTed to /colony/mutations, carrying a scope and a diff written in nine operation keys. The colony validates the whole post-state in one stage, then applies it while the process keeps running. meclaw-overview.md § Mutation format.

template vs. instance, cells in templates/ are classes, cells in the tree are instances. Instantiation copies the subtree in, mints fresh UUIDs and stamps the provenance, and from then on the instance has no link back, so editing a template never changes a colony grown from it. ../templates/README.md § What a template is.

UBF, the universal body format, the one body shape every cell emits and consumes: three top-level slots (system, messages[], attachments[]), at least one of them set. Nothing needs a format adapter between a chat turn, shell stdout, an HTTP response body and an inference result. meclaw-overview.md § Body format (universal).

params, the config.json block handed to the cell 1:1: the colony substitutes ${…} variables and interprets nothing else; what the keys mean is the cell type’s business. The cell never re-reads the file, updates arrive as a message. config.md § params.

port, a named address a producer writes to, as opposed to an implementation detail that merely happens to be reachable. Two producers arriving at the same port in the same shape are indistinguishable to whatever is behind it, and moving one is a breaking change. ../templates/collector/README.md § Ports.

seal, a hive that declares params.ports. Mutation validation then rejects any new edge that pairs a non-port node inside it with an endpoint outside it, in either direction, with error_code: "hive_port_boundary"; the birth graph is never rejected. cell-types.md § hive, a scope marker and a transit node.

memory hive, a member’s long-term memory as a hive of ordinary cells, never an agent’s. It is the member’s source of truth and the agents are lenses on it, so a second agent inherits what it knows. ../templates/memory-hive/README.md.

drain, the adapter between a closed session and a memory: a collector hands out its day in one batch, the memory writes one turn at a time, and the drain is that decomposition, idempotent across replays. ../templates/memory-drain/README.md.

episode, the unit of a memory’s write path: one turn, one append-only row, no model call, so nothing waits. Each row keeps happened_at apart from recorded_at, which is what stops an import of a year of history from collapsing into the minute you imported it. ../templates/memory-hive/README.md.

dream, the memory hive’s nightly consolidation run. It is delta-scoped and idempotent, and it supersedes instead of editing or removing a written value, so the same recall returns the same candidates. ../templates/memory-hive/README.md.

dead letter (DLQ), /colony/dead_letters, where a message goes when it cannot be routed: an unresolvable path, an expired TTL, an inactive cell, a hive with no matching out-edge. Every reason carries a canonical error_code string that is part of the public contract. meclaw-overview.md § Routing errors and the dead-letter queue.

corridor, an engineering discipline for the hot routing paths, which are byte-pinned against frozen fixtures so they cannot quietly drift, with the pin enforced in CI. A failing fixture gate is a real finding, never a flake. ../CONTRIBUTING.md § Test it.

Names of the shipped roles