glossary

glossary

Single source of truth for Polymath terminology. Reach for this when a term is ambiguous or when onboarding a new contributor.

Lifecycle artifacts

• PRD — Product Requirements Document. Problem, users, goals, non-goals, requirements, acceptance criteria, metrics. Owner: polymath-product.
• ADR — Architecture Decision Record (Michael Nygard). Context, decision, consequences. Owner: polymath-decisions (future tier).
• RFC — Request for Comments. Lightweight design document for changes that need group input. Owner: polymath-writing (future tier).
• Acceptance criteria — Concrete, testable Given/When/Then statements that gate the smallest shippable slice. Owner: polymath-product.
• Postmortem — Blameless incident retrospective: timeline, impact, 5-whys, action items. Owner: polymath-incident (future tier).

Engineering

• Feature-dev (TDD loop) — Write the smallest failing test, make it pass, refactor, repeat. Owner: polymath-engineering.
• Code review — Correctness + simplification critique. Owner: polymath-engineering.
• Verify-change — Run repo-appropriate verification (lint, type-check, tests, smoke). Owner: polymath-engineering.
• Read-code — Orient quickly in an unfamiliar area of a codebase. Owner: polymath-engineering.

Release

• Conventional Commits — type(scope): summary commit format.
• CHANGELOG — User-facing record of changes, grouped by [Unreleased] + release tags.
• Release notes — Customer-facing announcement; broader audience than CHANGELOG.

Workflows (flows-lite)

• flows-lite — Polymath's v0.1 workflow runner: serial, deterministic, paused-and-resumable.
• Step — One named action in a workflow with an invoke capability label.
• invoke: — Routing label of the form <plugin>:<capability>. v0.1 is a label, not a programmatic slash-command call.
• Guard — Precondition (e.g., git status clean) checked before the first step.
• mustPass: — Deterministic checks (fileExists, fileMatches, commandSucceeds, stepSummaryMatches) run after the last step. Failure pauses the workflow.
• Workflow state — ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_DATA}/workflows/<id>/state.json. Owned by bin/polymath-flow.

Marketplace

• Plugin — Single-responsibility unit of trust, versioning, and distribution.
• Component — A skill, command, agent, hook, MCP, or monitor inside a plugin.
• Always-on listing cost — Tokens consumed by component descriptions surfaced to the model every turn.
• Token budget — ≤ 400 per plugin; ≤ 1,500 MVP total. Measured by tools/token-budget.sh.