Glossary

The product, its documentation and its code use the same words on purpose. Two of them used to mean four things each, which cost us more time than any bug.

On the canvas

We say	We never say	What it is
prompt	module, step	A node the optimizer rewrites. The program is made of prompts.
router	orchestrator, branch	A prompt with more than one outgoing edge: the model returns `next` and picks the path. A router is still a prompt and is still optimized.
step	tool, plugin, integration	A node that is not part of the program: an external call the optimizer never rewrites.
program	pipeline, chain, graph	The prompts and edges together — what gets optimized.
evaluate	scorer block	The terminal block: scorers, objective, hold-out.

A program is made of prompts; steps fetch things from outside it. Prompts change during a run. Steps do not.

Running and shipping

We say	We never say	What it is
run	job, experiment	One optimization: rounds of rewrite, gate, evaluate.
baseline run	eval-only, dry run	A run with zero rounds: evaluates the prompts as written and stops.
round	iteration, generation	One pass of the search loop.
gate	filter	The small-batch check a rewrite must pass before earning a full evaluation.
hold-out	test set, validation set	Rows the search never sees. The number that counts.
version	deployment, release	An immutable published snapshot: prompts, models, steps, and the score it earned.
trace	log, record	One served request and what it produced.
outcome	feedback, correction	What happened after the answer. A trace plus an outcome is a label.
template	example, sample, demo	A library entry you add to your projects. What you get is a project.

Data

We say	We never say	What it is
dataset	training data, corpus	Rows with inputs and a label column.
label	answer, target, ground truth	The right answer for a row.
freeze	cache, snapshot, sync	Running a step over every row once and writing its answers onto the dataset as columns. Evaluation reads the frozen columns; production calls the step live.
enrichment	augmentation	What freezing produces: the step's columns on the dataset.

Authorisation

Six things were all called “credentials”. “Credential” on its own is banned in our copy — say which: house key, endpoint, step key, connection, app credentials, API key. What each one is →

Things we deliberately do not have

Saying these would imply a promise we have not made:

plugin, marketplace, registry — steps are manifests we curate. Nobody else publishes.
agent — nothing here decides its own goals or writes its own code.
fine-tuning, training — we change prompts, never weights.
guaranteed, optimal, best — the search reports a hold-out number with a standard error. It does not promise.