Glossary
Definitions for the terms that recur across the agents-in-a-box docs. Where a term has a precise contract, the authoritative source is linked.
Agents, sessions, worktrees
Agent — an AI coding harness instance (Claude Code, Codex CLI, GitHub Copilot, Gemini). agents-in-a-box is harness-agnostic: skills, agents, and plugins are deployed to each harness’s config directory.
Session — a single conversation/run of an agent against a project. The TUI lists, attaches to, and recovers sessions; session logs are walked per-provider by the session-reader plugin.
Worktree — a git worktree giving a task its own isolated checkout and branch (architecture: worktree-per-task). Lets multiple agents work in parallel without colliding on the same working tree.
Plugins
Plugin (v2, subprocess) — an ainb plugin that conforms to the v2 contract: a native executable spawned by the host as a child process, exchanging JSON-RPC 2.0 over framed stdio (stdin = requests from host, stdout = responses + reverse-calls, stderr = host log output). Governed by capability grants in its manifest.
Claude Code plugin — a different concept: a Claude Code harness extension (e.g. the reflect plugin) that bundles skills, hooks, and adapters and is installed with claude plugin install. It does not implement the ainb v2 subprocess contract; the two senses of “plugin” are unrelated.
Toolkit units
Skill — a structured workflow invoked by slash command (e.g. /commit, /plan), shared across harnesses from toolkit/packages/skills/.
Agent (toolkit) — a specialised sub-agent definition (e.g. code-reviewer, distinguished-engineer) from toolkit/packages/agents/, delegated to for focused work.
Workflow — a multi-phase orchestration that chains skills (plan → implement → validate) under a structured delivery process.
Knowledge base
QMD — the vector / semantic search engine of the knowledge base; answers “what matches?” via embedding similarity (BM25 + vector hybrid).
GraphRAG — the graph search engine; answers “what’s connected?” by traversing the entity-relationship graph. Built with nano-graphrag using a passthrough LLM that consumes pre-extracted entity sidecars (no external LLM calls during indexing).
Sidecar — an .entities.yaml file sitting next to a knowledge document (doc.md + doc.entities.yaml). It carries the pre-extracted entities and relationships that feed GraphRAG indexing directly.
Community report — a GraphRAG-generated summary of a cluster (community) of related entities, used to answer higher-level questions about a connected region of the graph.
Terminal & tmux
tmux — terminal multiplexer used to run persistent, detachable agent and dev-server sessions. Sessions survive disconnects and are reattached with tmux attach -t <session>.
PTY — pseudo-terminal; the kernel device pair that lets the TUI and tmux drive a child process as if it had a real terminal (handles resize, raw input, ANSI output).
Pane — a single rectangular split inside a tmux window running one shell/process.
Window — a full-screen tab within a tmux session; a window contains one or more panes.
Plugin contract & runtime
ABI — Application Binary Interface; the host/plugin runtime contract version. A v2 plugin declares abi_version = 2 in its manifest and must match the host’s ABI_VERSION (currently 2). See spec-v2 §5.4.
Wire version — the schema version of a snapshot/event type. Plugin types crates (e.g. ainb-plugin-types-sessions) carry a pub const WIRE_VERSION: u32 (currently 3); subscribers must check event.version == WIRE_VERSION and reject mismatches gracefully rather than panicking.
CTS (Conformance Test Suite) — the executable form of the plugin spec. ainb-plugin-cts-v2 covers 14 axes (manifest round-trip, framing, method dispatch, capability gating, render determinism, snapshot pub/sub, action timeout, log filtering, fs path guard, graceful shutdown, crash recovery, quarantine, CLI dispatch capture, chunked publish ordering). A plugin author runs it via cargo test for a per-axis pass/fail report.
Canary — a minimal plugin written to exercise exactly one CTS axis, living at crates/ainb-plugin-cts-v2/tests/canaries/<axis>/.
cts-v2 — the ainb-plugin-cts-v2 crate: the host-side conformance test runner (14 axes) plus its canary plugins.
testkit — the ainb-plugin-testkit crate: an in-process test harness for plugin authors. A plugin author hands their Plugin impl to testkit to exercise it without spawning a real subprocess.
notifyd — the ainb-plugin-notifyd crate: the ainb-owned notification daemon. Listens on a Unix domain socket at ~/.agents-in-a-box/notify.sock and is one of the in-tree v2 reference plugins (alongside burndown for analytics and session-reader for the session data backend).