Glossary

The terms this product uses precisely.

Term	Meaning
Design Package	The unit of everything: one solution being designed, assured, approved, and operated; carries a human-readable design ID like ACME-0012
Component	An element of the design. Internal capability slots take a catalog technology; external and legacy components state theirs
Actor	A human or organizational role that uses the system; renders as a person, never takes a technology
Gap	An internal capability the approved catalog does not cover: the one thing the loop will not decide alone
Authorization Boundary	The set of components your organization is signing up to build, operate, and defend; actors and external systems sit outside it
Scope Proposal	A component a re-run wanted to add without citing a driver; quarantined until a human accepts or discards it
Lock (Architect Override)	A manual edit preserved across AI re-runs; requires risk sign-off before approval
Deferral Exception	A recorded decision to decide later: capability, reason, review-by date; covers its gap only while active
Risk Sign-off	A named authority accepting residual risk for a specific design version, separation of duties enforced
Approval Baseline	The snapshot taken at approval: the design and its control results; the reference everything afterward is compared against
Supersede	What approving a revision does to its predecessor: the old record stays, immutable, clearly marked
Drift Finding	A detected divergence between the baseline and reality; deduplicated, auto-resolving, acknowledgeable
Acknowledge	The governed override on a finding: visible, recorded, stops counting, never blocks the gate
Conformance Gate	The approval baseline as pipeline enforcement: release gating, Terraform plan checks, signed policy bundles
Delivery Twin	The synced picture of build progress: statuses flow back from your tracker onto the plan and the diagrams
Trust Zone	The deterministic placement of components (public, application, data) that makes boundary crossings visible on diagrams