Operational Vocabulary
Glossary
Precise definitions for the operational engineering vocabulary used throughout Yanzi. These terms are the conceptual foundation for deterministic context, governance, and release engineering.
C
- Canonical Lineage Release The governance-approved operational lineage for a release — the single authoritative record of context decisions, checkpoints, and approvals that produced a given release artifact.
- Certified Candidate Release A release candidate that has passed Yanzi's governance certification process — its operational lineage has been validated against governed intent and approved for promotion.
- Context Drift Drift & Convergence The gradual divergence of an AI session's working assumptions from the governed operational context that was established at session start.
- Convergence Validation Release The process of confirming that current system state converges to the governed intent defined in the operational context — performed before release promotion.
D
- Deterministic Context Composition Core The process of assembling operational context for an AI-assisted session such that the same verified inputs always produce the same context output — reproducible, governed, and verifiable.
- Deterministic Release Convergence Release A release state in which the implementation has verifiably converged to governed operational intent, and the convergence is reproducible from the corpus record.
O
- Operational Determinism Core The property of an engineering system in which the same governed inputs always produce the same operational outputs — reproducible by design, not by coincidence.
- Operational Drift Drift & Convergence The gradual divergence of an engineering system's actual state from its governed operational intent, accumulated across multiple sessions and decisions over time.
- Operational Lineage Core The traceable chain of context decisions, captures, and checkpoints that produced a given operational state — the verifiable history of how a system got to where it is.
P
- Packs Context Library Versioned, bundled sets of operational context for a specific engineering domain — architecture patterns, constraints, standards, and terminology shipped as a single loadable artifact.
- Promotable Lineage Release An operational lineage record that has passed certification and governance validation, making the associated release candidate eligible for promotion.
- Provenance Continuity Core The unbroken chain of verifiable provenance records across all context artifacts in an operational corpus — no gaps, no unverified links.
R
- Release Convergence Release The state in which a release candidate's implementation is consistent with the governed operational intent established for it — what was built matches what was governed.
- Roles Context Library Bounded authority definitions that specify what an AI agent may act on within a governed session — separating proposal authority from execution authority.
- Rules Context Library Human-authored operational constraints applied at session boundaries — append-only records that define what the AI model may not do within a governed session, regardless of role.