Glossary

• Workspace: The shared home for people, projects, permissions, and execution targets. Often called an organization.
• Project: Where related work is organized and where repositories or other resources are linked.
• Mission: A durable record for a larger goal. It holds status, priority, shared context, history, and delivery artifacts.
• Objective: One actionable step within a mission — the unit of work an agent receives for a single pass.
• Agent: The coding tool that performs an objective (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and others).
• Connector / plugin: The integration that lets an agent attach, update, ask, and deliver through the Overlord protocol.
• Session: One agent’s attachment to an objective, identified by a session key.
• Delivery: The completed handoff from an agent, including its summary, artifacts, changed files, and rationale.
• Change rationale: A structured, per-file record of what changed, why, and its impact.
• Checkpoint: A snapshot of the working tree that anchors review and file-change rationale to a known repository state.
• Shared context: A persistent, mission-scoped key/value store for durable facts that future sessions should know.
• Artifact: A file or structured payload attached to a mission, such as test results, a note, or a next-steps list.
• Project resource: A repository, checkout, or other source associated with a project.
• Execution target: A machine or environment where an objective runs, identified by a device fingerprint.
• Primary resource: The default directory used for a launch when no explicit resource is named — one per (project, target) pair.
• Runner: The local ovld runner process that claims queued execution requests and launches agents.
• Execution request: A durable queue row that tells a runner which objective to launch, where, and how.
• USER_TOKEN: A durable, user-owned credential used by the CLI, agents, runners, and API clients.