Vocabulary
These words carry weight in this product: they name states a submission or an install can be in, and two of them are routinely swapped for each other. Use them the way this page uses them and your submission will be read the way you meant it.
The pair that gets confused
- rejected
- A vetting outcome. A submission is rejected, with one verb from the fixed vocabulary on What gets rejected. It is a decision about a submission, made by a person.
- refused
- A provenance or install outcome. A box refuses an install whose content does not match the digest that was approved. It is a decision made by a mechanism, at the moment of the attempt, and no person is in the loop.
The nouns
- box
- The sealed, dedicated computer a customer's Systems run on. Not an instance, not a VM, not a server. One customer, one box.
- System, Systems
- Capitalised. The marketplace noun for an instructions package with a manifest. A System is not an app, a plugin or a skill.
- install
- Putting a System onto a box, after the customer has read its manifest and digest and consented to that digest.
- manifest
- The JSON object a System ships with, declaring what it may reach. Written by the author, read by the customer.
- egress, allowlist
- Outbound network access, and the declared list of hosts a System may reach. On the boxes customers are given, that list is enforced on the box rather than described in a document, so the allowlist is the wall rather than a picture of one.
- digest
- The sha256 of a System's content. It is what a customer consents to, and what the content is checked against later. Change the content, change the digest.
- consent
- A customer's recorded agreement to a specific digest and manifest. Consent is to content, not to a summary of content.
- provenance, attestation
- The chain that binds an approved submission to the content a box installs. A System that fails provenance does not resolve at install, and the catalog answers “not found” for it exactly as it does for one that was never submitted.
- capability wall
- The fixed set of tools available on a box. A manifest cannot widen it; it can only declare which part of it a System asks to use.
- vetted, approved
- Reviewed and admitted to the catalog. Approval is of a submission at a digest, not of an author.
- grace period
- The interval between a plan ending and a box being removed. See Billing.
- warm pool
- The set of prepared boxes a new customer's box is claimed from.
- heartbeat
- The signal an agent sends to say it is answering. A box that has powered on is not a box that is ready.
- bring your own keys, BYOK
- The arrangement where the customer supplies the model API key their box runs on. See Bring your own keys. Spell it out on first use.
How we write, and why it may matter to you
Our own copy is written to a one-pager: short declaratives, second person for the customer, present tense, no exclamation marks, and first-person plural kept for commitments we keep. Numbers are digits and dates are absolute. Confidence comes from being specific rather than from adjectives.
That one-pager also names words we do not use, in three groups: hype adjectives, absolute security claims, and filler adverbs that make a sentence sound less certain than it is. The words themselves are not reprinted on this page for a mechanical reason worth stating: these pages are scanned against that list and have to return zero matches, so a page carrying the list could not pass the check that keeps the rest of them clean. Exempting a page from its own scan would be worse than not printing the list.
None of that governs the instructions inside a System. It governs this site. If you want the effect on your own instructions in one line: write what the System does, name what it will not do, and let the manifest carry the rest.
Copy status and the documents it was written against: About this copy.