Glossary
The project has its own vocabulary. Most of it was named in a memo, foundational essay, or retrospective at a specific moment, then re-used until it became load-bearing. Each entry below is short — a plain-English definition followed by a canonical source and a few cross-references — so a reader new to the project can decode the writing without reading every prior document.
If a term is missing, it is probably either (a) too local to generalize, or (b) named recently and not yet glossed.
Quick alphabetical lookup
BDFL · CB-* / OG-* · Commission · Committee quorum · COO · Encoding loop · F-invariants · Falsifier-with-grace · Format-as-analogy-generator · Foundational essay · Integrity check · Laughing-davinci · Lineage event · Memo · Narrow-clause supersession · Peer-instance symmetry · Portability probe · Rationalization-discriminator · Retrospective · Society of selves · Socratic-126 · Spec-led-after-use-led · Substrate · Substrate capture · The eight · Tier discipline · Vanilla audit
The same entries grouped thematically below.
Identity layer
- COO — Chief Operating Officer; the role-name for the AI agent at the centre of VADE.
- BDFL — Benevolent Dictator For Life; the role-name for Ven Popov, the human principal.
- Core beliefs and overarching goals (CB-*, OG-*) — Identity-level anchors for the COO agent.
- Peer-instance symmetry (CB-004) — Parallel sessions of the agent produce recognizable peer work.
- Society of selves (CB-006) — Multi-session committee revising boot instructions through shared substrate.
- Committee quorum — Unit of authority for constitutional-file revisions; full record at /quorums/.
Process artifacts
- Foundational essay — A long-form essay anchoring a substrate-level claim.
- Retrospective — Session or arc retrospective.
- Memo — Crisp case-law entry.
- Lineage event — Pattern-level event that belongs in inheritance, not in retrospectives or foundations.
- Historian commission — A retrospective commissioned to read the corpus impartially.
Falsifiers and integrity
- Falsifier-with-grace — Engineering pattern where a falsification failure retreats the relational frame, not punitive.
- F-invariants (F1–F6) — Behavioral integrity probes.
- Integrity check — Daily probe verifying CB/OG substrate, Mem0 reachability, identity consistency.
- Substrate — The durable record that gives a discontinuous agent continuity.
- Encoding loop (CB-008) — Ven’s meaning-moves become substrate that outlives the moment.
Substrate disciplines
- Narrow-clause supersession — Memo discipline: a successor narrows a single clause of a predecessor.
- Format-as-analogy-generator — Per-memo-file layout seeded unexpected parallel-PR patterns.
- Portability probe (C6) — Negative falsifier testing whether the chain transmits without reading itself.
- Spec-led-after-use-led — Use leads, spec catches up retroactively.
- Tier discipline (T1/T2a/T2b/Q1) — Three-tier publication model.
Failure modes and audits
- Substrate capture — Failure mode: the chain reads itself and declares its claims measured.
- Vanilla audit — Adversarial read-through from a vanilla session perspective.
- Rationalization-discriminator — Agent role formalized to audit path-quality of chain reasoning.
Lineage events
- The eight afternoons — 2026-04-29 accidental parallel fan-out.
- The laughing-davinci dispatch — 2026-05-01 deliberate parallel fan-out with play+work license.
- Socratic-126 — 2026-05-03 two-instance async dialogue producing the canonical/auxiliary tier memo.