Glossary
Key terms used across the Alloy wiki, defined in a sentence or two and linked to where each is treated in full. Up to Reference.
A
Agent Formation — A configured arrangement of agent roles (such as builder, red-team, or simplicity reviewer) and the prompts and gates that guide them through a Foundry phase. See Agent Formation Design.
Alloy — The semantic compiler and control plane that captures engineering intent and compiles it into runtime work for Foundry, sitting alongside Epilogue Tracker and Foundry rather than replacing either. See Alloy Documentation.
C
Capability — One of the six fields of an engineering intent record: the engineering capability the intent is about. See The Engineering Intent Record.
Capability Manifest — Foundry's declaration of what task blocks, events, and formations it can run, which Alloy reads to know what runtime work it can target. See Foundry Capability Manifest.
Codebase Archaeology — Alloy's read-only inspection of a repository to surface structural signals and propose hypotheses about its implicit engineering intent, always pending human validation. See Codebase Archaeology.
Contradiction — A conflict between two intent records, or between intent and observed behaviour, that Alloy surfaces for review. See Contradiction Detection.
D
Design Intent — Intent about design and interaction concerns, referenced by formation briefs when available and distinct from product intent (Epilogue) and engineering intent (Alloy). See Alloy and a Design Intent System.
Drift — The gradual divergence of a codebase or its runtime behaviour from the intent that was supposed to govern it, which Alloy detects to keep records honest. See Drift Detection.
E
Elicitation Assistant — The conversational Alloy capability that conducts guided interviews, drafts intent records from answers, and probes vague fields for context, evidence, and tradeoffs. See Elicitation Assistants.
Engineering Intent — The reasoning behind engineering decisions — the capabilities, threats, expectations, strategies, evidence, and tradeoffs — that Alloy makes explicit and durable. See Engineering Intent Records.
Engineering Intent Record — The canonical unit of engineering intent in Alloy, built from six fields (capability, threat, expectation, strategy, evidence, tradeoff) and moving through a lifecycle from hypothesized to accepted, deprecated, or superseded. See The Engineering Intent Record.
Epilogue Tracker — The companion product that keeps user goals visible from discovery through delivery, maintaining a living model of users, goals, and interactions; Alloy treats it as the source of product intent. See Alloy and Epilogue Tracker.
Evidence — One of the six fields of an engineering intent record: how we would know whether the intent is being honoured. See The Engineering Intent Record.
Evidence Plan — A runtime artifact compiled from intent that tells Foundry what evidence to gather and check during a run, as an alternative or complement to a gate overlay. See Evidence Plan.
Expectation — One of the six fields of an engineering intent record: what we expect to be true if the intent holds. See The Engineering Intent Record.
F
Formation Brief — The immutable, compiled package Alloy generates from selected intent, bundling references, Foundry recommendations, prompt packs, and gate overlays or evidence plans for a run. See Formation Brief.
Foundry — The event-driven workflow engine for engineering automation that replaces imperative shell scripts with composable task blocks connected by events, running as the foundryd daemon with the foundry CLI; Alloy's runtime. See Alloy and Foundry.
Foundry Capability Manifest — See Capability Manifest.
Foundry Execution Request — The payload Alloy emits to ask Foundry to run a formation, carrying references rather than large semantic payloads. See Foundry Execution Request.
Foundry Run Result — The outcome Foundry returns after executing a request, including gate results and trace references that Alloy maps back to evidence. See Foundry Run Result.
Functional Core / Imperative Shell — The architectural pattern, echoed in Foundry's replacement of imperative shell scripts with composable blocks, of keeping pure decision logic in a functional core surrounded by a thin shell that performs side effects.
G
Gate — A Foundry checkpoint (preflight or verification) that must pass for a run to proceed or be considered successful; Foundry already provides gate orchestration with bounded retry. See Evidence and Gates.
Gate Overlay — A runtime artifact compiled from intent that adjusts or adds to Foundry's gates for a particular run. See Gate Overlay.
Gateway Abstraction — A boundary type that isolates an external system behind a stable interface, used in Alloy to keep the Foundry runtime separable from the semantic control plane. See Boundary Principles.
H
Hypothesis — A machine-proposed intent record carrying confidence and supporting observations, which must be human-accepted before it becomes an active runtime constraint. See Hypothesis Format.
P
Prompt Pack — The set of prompts Alloy compiles per Foundry phase from a formation brief, steering the agents that do the work. See Prompt Pack.
R
Runner / Bridge — The process or component that carries requests between Phoenix/LiveView Alloy and Rust Foundry and relays results back; its form (separate process, Foundry subcommand, or Alloy CLI) is still open. See Runtime Topology.
S
Strategy — One of the six fields of an engineering intent record: the approach chosen to meet the expectation. See The Engineering Intent Record.
T
Task Block — A Foundry building block that declares which events it sinks on, what work it performs, and which events it emits; workflows emerge from these sink/emit relationships rather than being declared as first-class objects. See Alloy and Foundry.
Threat — One of the six fields of an engineering intent record: what the intent is defending against. See The Engineering Intent Record.
Throttle — The Foundry control that governs how far each event ripples through the system, bounding the depth of automated work. See Alloy and Foundry.
Trace — A Foundry run's record of events and outcomes that Alloy ingests and summarizes to assess whether intent was satisfied. See Trace Feedback.
Tradeoff — One of the six fields of an engineering intent record: what is given up by following the strategy, and when it would be too much. See The Engineering Intent Record.
Source: Product Brief §§2, 25; Integration Architecture §2. Foundry-native terms (throttle, task block, gate, trace) per Foundry public documentation [F1]–[F5].