PacketBenchDocs

Glossary#

PacketBench's documentation defines most of its vocabulary in passing, inside the page that needed the word. This page collects those definitions in one place so a term can be looked up without reading the page it came from.

Rows are alphabetical by term, case-insensitive, sorting a multi-word term on its first word. Each row gives one sentence and the page that owns the full explanation. This is a lookup, not a tour — Core concepts is the narrative version and remains the place to start if the vocabulary is new.

Terms#

Term Definition Owned by
agent profile A reusable bundle of launch settings — system prompt, allowed-tools list, memory-brief toggle, permission mode, plan mode and an optional pinned model — applied to a conversation at start. Settings
agent row One of the nine entries in the provider picker; it decides which backend serves a conversation, where a profile decides how the agent behaves. Agents & conversations
AgentCli The TypeScript union of agent-row ids that persisted conversations, attempts and tasks store verbatim (src/stores/agentTaskStore.ts:158); it also carries the four PTY CLI ids, and the same value appears in persisted records under the field name agentConfigId. Architecture internals
attempt One agent's independent shot at a Flight's prompt, running in its own worktree on its own branch and backed by one API-agent session. Flight Deck
auxiliary LLM The provider and model resolved for PacketBench's own short, single-shot generation tasks — spec import, PR prose, session summaries, pattern extraction and eleven other classes — which can never resolve to a Claude or ChatGPT subscription login. Settings
coordination inbox An append-only, versioned mailbox on a Flight for steering a task, a role, an agent or the whole Flight, carrying seven message kinds and five delivery states. Flight Deck
denial floor One of three refusals — credentials, outside_workspace, protected_publish — that every MCP trust profile carries and that no grant can lift. MCP hub
dock The right-hand panel strip; the Workspace surface registers Editor and Git, only one visible at a time and sharing a single width budget. Workspaces & terminals
dormant hydration Restoring saved workspaces without launching anything: opening the app starts no process, and a workspace's PTYs start only when you open that workspace. Workspaces & terminals
fence A test that scans repository source for a wrong-looking shape rather than exercising behaviour, used when the mistake is a plausible idiom that survives review. Testing & gates
Flight The top-level unit of work above issues and sessions: an objective, milestones and tasks, linked issues and conversations, cost rollups, and a set of attempts. Flight Deck
gate One of the package.json script rungs — pnpm preflight, pnpm check, pnpm release:readiness — that must pass before a change ships; there is no CI, so a gate runs only when a person runs it. Testing & gates
integration branch The branch a cooperative Flight converges accepted task work onto — packetbench/flight/<flightId>, worktree under .pkt-flight-integrations/ — before landing it into your trunk. Flight Deck
learned pattern A short convention distilled from a batch of memory-event summaries, categorised and carrying a confidence score; patterns are the main thing injected into an agent's prompt. Memory
memory brief The budgeted block of text prepended to an agent's prompt, assembled from learned patterns, Flight lessons, recent session summaries and project notes, then truncated to a character budget. Memory
Mission The former user-facing name for a Flight, surviving only as read-side compatibility (#[serde(alias = "missionId")] on flight-approval records, canonicalised to flightId on the next save); neither the docs nor the source records why the rename was made. Flight Deck
module One of exactly two optional features registered in src/modules/registry.ts — Code Quality and Dictation — which can be disabled; nothing else in the app is a module and there is no plug-in API. Architecture at a glance
mosaic The draggable tiling layout that arranges a workspace's panes, built on react-mosaic-component. Workspaces & terminals
pane One tile in a workspace's mosaic, discriminated solely by kind: terminal, conversation or file. Workspaces & terminals
provider id The backend identifier that selects a transport implementation (anthropic, claude-oauth, and so on); a different id space from an agent row id, and never derived by stripping the api- prefix. Architecture internals
PTY A pseudo-terminal — the real child process behind a terminal pane, launchable only from an allowlist of agent CLIs, shells and ssh. Workspaces & terminals
Reviewer Gate An optional independent read-only reviewer that runs when a Flight attempt finishes and blocks acceptance until it passes or you record an override; it accepts at most 40 acceptance criteria. Flight Deck
scope key The single string a memory record is filed under — a plain path for local, ssh:<serverId>:<remote path> for SSH — stored in a field named projectPath, so a recorded projectPath is not always a path. Memory internals
scope pill The badge beside a Settings section heading declaring that setting's reach: App, Project, Workspace, New sessions, New conversations or New Flights. Settings
spec import The Issues feature that turns a pasted spec or PRD into editable issue drafts through the auxiliary LLM, capped at 200 KB of input and a 120-second timeout. Issues & git hosts
TOFU Trust on first use — the StrictHostKeyChecking=accept-new fallback taken when an SSH host has no pinned fingerprint, which accepts whichever key answers first and logs a warning. SSH remote workspaces
trust snapshot The frozen copy of an MCP server's trust profile taken at session start, so editing Settings mid-session cannot widen an already-running agent's authority. MCP hub
worktree A real git worktree isolating an agent's writes from your checkout, created at .pkt-worktrees/<id> on branch pkt/<id> by an attempt or by a conversation with the worktree toggle on. Flight Deck

Names that mean the same thing#

Three clusters of names are used interchangeably in the codebase. The distinction a reader expects does not exist in the code, so none is invented here.

These name one thing The names, and where each is used
An agent row's id agent row in the UI and the docs; AgentCli as the TypeScript union; agent config id in persisted records and in Rust doc comments, where the field is literally agentConfigId on Task, Attempt and WorkspacePane.
An API conversation's identity conversation id and session id are the same value — sessionId === conversationId is stated as an invariant at src-tauri/src/acp/routing.rs:10, and every api-agent:* event is keyed on it. A PTY session id is an unrelated third thing.
A unit of parallel work Flight everywhere current; Mission in persisted data written before the rename. Read-side aliases accept both; nothing new should write the second.
Note

fence and gate are not interchangeable, despite sitting next to each other on the same page. A gate is a script rung you run; a fence is one test inside it. All four fences execute under pnpm test, which is the third step of pnpm preflight.