Glossary
Terms Minnow uses, in the sense Minnow means them.
Running — The board is ticking: eligible work starts up to the concurrency cap until you press Stop or the board finishes.
Board — A kanban of tasks generated from a plan document, worked by agents. See Orchestrate boards.
Brain — Your own knowledge wiki: markdown pages in your Minnow home that the assistant reads and writes. Minnow’s memory system. Not this manual.
Composer — The input area: text field, mode strip, attachments, tools, microphone, model picker, context ring, send.
Context policy — What an agent does when it hits its input cap: summarize, slide, truncate or archive.
Context ring — The dial beside Send showing how much of the model’s window this conversation uses.
Concurrency — How many board tasks may start at once. Sequential is Running at 1.
Fixer — The board role that repairs a task after its tests fail.
Goal — A completion condition set with /goal. A separate evaluator agent checks it after each turn.
Integration branch — The branch a board merges completed task work into, when worktree isolation is on.
Isolation — Giving board tasks their own git worktrees so parallel agents do not collide. Off, per-task, or per-wave.
Loop — A prompt re-run on a schedule in one chat, set with /loop. Different from a Scheduler job.
MCP — Model Context Protocol. A standard for exposing tools; MCP tools appear as mcp__<server>__<tool>.
Minnow home — The folder holding everything Minnow keeps: %USERPROFILE%\.minnow or ~/.minnow.
Mode — What the assistant is allowed to be this turn. Changes the system prompt and the tool list. General, Build, Plan, Debug, plus surface-bound ones.
Plan document — Markdown under documentation/plans/. The one place Plan mode may write, and the input a board executes.
Provider — An OpenAI-compatible endpoint Minnow talks to: a local runtime, a served model, or a cloud API.
Quarantine — A board task parked after exhausting its retries, along with its dependents. Cleared with Requeue.
Routing — Binding different models to different jobs — main chat, chat titles, goal evaluation, each agent role.
Skill — A SKILL.md file of packaged instructions, invoked with /.
Sub-agent — A nested agent spawned for one job, running in the background and reporting a structured result.
Tool — A function the model can call. Every one is Off, Ask or Full.
Wave — A dependency group on a board. Tasks in one wave can run in parallel; the next wave waits.
Work agent — A role with its own prompt, sampler and optional model: builder, planner, reviewer, researcher and others.
Workspace root — The folder file and git tools are confined to. Set by the project you open in Code, or Sandbox (~/.minnow/workspace) when you have not picked a repo yet.
Legacy routes — #/workspaces is the workspace gate (same as #/, #, and #/desktop after resolveLegacyHash). #/app/chat redirects to Code chat (#/app/code/chat). Legacy #/bugs opens Issues (#/app/issues).
Worktree — A separate git checkout of the same repository. Board isolation uses one per task so agents do not collide on a single working tree. That is git isolation, not OS host containment — see the agent shell sandbox under Privacy and security.