Glossary

If a word in 0dai docs sent you here, that's the point. The 6 AI tools 0dai supports each have their own vocabulary; 0dai adds a few of its own. This page keeps them in one place.

0dai-specific terms

ai/ directory

The single source of truth in your repo. Everything 0dai generates for individual agent configs (CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, .gemini/, etc.) is derived from files inside ai/. You edit ai/, run 0dai sync, and every agent picks up the change.

Manifest

Files under ai/manifest/ that describe the project to agents: stack (Python/Node/Go/etc.), commands, discovery rules, the current task, and what's been applied. Think of it as package.json but for the AI layer.

Persona

A YAML file under ai/personas/ that defines a role an agent should take when handling certain work — architect, QA, devops, content-editor, creative-director. Each persona has its own voice, banned vocabulary, and reference style guides. Agents read the right persona for the task and behave accordingly.

Playbook

A reusable workflow under ai/playbooks/. Short markdown procedures the agent can follow when a known situation comes up (CI is blocked, merge needs ghost-veto, secrets rotation, etc.). Less rigid than code, more rigid than free-form advice.

Experience

The append-only record of what agents tried, what worked, what didn't. Lives under ai/experience/. Three stages: raw events → candidates (auto-scored) → accepted (promoted into reusable patterns). This is how 0dai learns from your team's history.

Swarm

The task queue across multiple agents. When you run 0dai run <goal>, 0dai decomposes the goal into tasks and dispatches them to whichever agents are available (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, etc.). 0dai swarm status shows what's queued, active, and done.

Session roaming

Picking up where another agent left off. You start a task in Claude Code, hit context-limit, and continue in Codex — 0dai serializes the session state so the new agent doesn't re-read your repo from scratch.

Discovery

Auto-detection of your project's stack. 0dai detect scans package.json, pyproject.toml, go.mod, etc. and picks the matching playbook + persona set. Manifest gets populated based on what's found.

Industry terms

MCP (Model Context Protocol)

Anthropic's open protocol for letting AI agents call tools. 0dai exposes 49 tools at the free tier (113 with Pro) — things like repo_grep_local, memory_search, gh_pr_list. The MCP server runs as a stdio subprocess of your agent CLI. Agents that support MCP (Claude Code, Cursor, Continue, etc.) can call these without any 0dai-specific glue code.

CLI

Command-line interface. Each AI tool 0dai supports — Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Gemini, Aider, Qoder — ships its own CLI. 0dai is also a CLI (0dai init, 0dai sync, etc.) but it doesn't replace the agent CLIs; it configures them.

Operational terms (appear in commit messages and PR bodies)

Auto-merge queue (aka AI-MQ)

The bot that drains approved PRs sequentially. Label a PR mq:queued and the orchestrator (scripts/merge_queue_orchestrator.py) rebases, runs tests, and merges it. If something blocks, the PR gets mq:blocked and you intervene. Replaces the "babysit-each-branch" pattern teams default to.

Agent-to-agent review (aka cross-identity helper)

The pattern where one AI's PR is approved by a different AI identity, so the second-pair-of-eyes invariant survives without pulling a human into every review. Implemented in scripts/codex-review-helper.sh and documented in the review-flow design.

Flight

A multi-PR sprint with its own source-of-truth file. When a piece of work spans 3+ related PRs, the flight contract (ai/contracts/flight-decomposition.md) gives that work one place to track goals, blockers, and retro. Each PR carries a flight:F<N> goal:G<M> footer that gets enforced by CI.

Phantom-merge

A GitHub bug where admin-squashing a PR that's behind main can produce a merge commit unreachable from main's history — looks merged in the UI but the changes aren't actually there. scripts/0dai-merge refuses BEHIND PRs and verifies post-merge ancestry to prevent this.

Why we have this page

Two readers told us in the May 2026 focus group that 0dai vocabulary was opaque on first read — a junior dev bounced at the README headline, an OSS maintainer couldn't recommend the project to contributors without comprehensible names. This glossary is the fix. If a term you saw isn't here, tell the maintainers and we'll add it.