GLOSSARY.md

title	Glossary
description	The biodiverse register hum thinks in. Names carry meaning beyond function.

Glossary

This page is a quick lookup of every word that appears in the hum codebase as a load-bearing term. Names are chosen so they feel like the thing, so readers and writers share the same mental model.

The thrum

term	meaning
thrum	the hum-native vibration protocol, carrying tones across a range of chi. Defined in hum.thrum and specified in THRUM.md; the NDJSON socket between humd and a bee is one medium it travels.
tone	one vibration on the thrum: the envelope, plus the body its chi declares.
chi	the tone's discriminator: prompt, unfurl, wilt, gossip-publish, …
chis	the list of chi values a bee speaks, advertised in its hello.
range	every chi a tone may carry, each saying who sounds it, who hears it, and whether it crosses humds.
pattern	a figure tones make together: an attunement, a bloom, a tendril.
attunement	a bee's hello, and humd's verdict on it: a breath admits the bee, an echo with ok: false refuses it.
law	what every node does with any tone, in any medium: drop it past dusk, hear a mid once, merge wane by max, carry unknown fields whole, advise on undeclared keys.
medium	what carries a tone whole and says nothing about it: the stream (NDJSON on a socket, TCP, TLS or iroh), the link, a message.
link	hum bee link, hum's client as a process, which a bee in any language speaks to over two pipes. It signs the hello, reconnects, and checks every tone against the thrum.

The envelope

What every tone carries, whatever its chi.

term	meaning
rid	the echo key: an echo, or a reply, carries the rid of what it answers. Never a dedup key.
sid	the line of blooms a tone belongs to, the string its sigil is drawn from. The forager picks it.
sigil	what ties a run of blooms together: a hash of their sid, stable across reconnects.
wane	a Lamport clock per sigil, incremented on every state mutation.
dusk	absolute ms expiry on a tone. Past dusk, drop.
mid	the at-most-once claim: an id the originator mints once, which a receiver dispatches once. Absent, the tone is heard every time it is sent.
ext	a bee's own data on a tone, under its own key, carried untouched.

Keeping in step

The tones humd and a bee keep each other in step with.

term	meaning
breath	humd accepting a hello, and keeping the bee in step. A forager's breath says what it can reach, breathed again when that changes.
echo	delivery ack for a rid. An answer is an echo; nothing returns.
pulse	a moment in a cell's life, with the nurse's headroom after it.
advisory	what the thrum tells a bee to fix without refusing it: a log tone whose fields.advisory is the code.

Hives and bees

term	meaning
hive	the kind. A directory with an Orchfile is a hive, and that is the whole test; what it takes to be a bee of it is the hive's own business. A hive doesn't run and doesn't send anything. claude-cli is a hive; openai-server is a hive; market-maker is a hive.
hive installation	teaching a humd a kind (hum hive <ref> install). It records the hive on that humd and runs the hive's hive-install unit, if it has one; everything else the hive runs is its own business. A humd understands a bee only through a hive installed there, and never routes to a remote bee of a kind it was never taught.
bee	a participant. A bee is a key: its hid is bee_<sha256(pubkey)>, filed at bees/<hid>.key. Whatever signs a hello with that key is the bee, be it a process its hive started, a runtime hosting many bees, or a service on a phone. The hello names the hive it belongs to, and the bee does the one role it was entered for.
entering	a hive signing a bee in (hum bee enter --hive <hive> --as <label> --role <role>), minting its key and recording it under the hive by a label the hive knows it by, with the role it plays, so the same label is always the same bee. humd admits only a hello signed by an entered key, under the hive and role it entered. Entering starts no process; that is the hive's to do.
exiting	a hive signing a bee out: humd refuses its next hello.
reentering	a hive signing an exited bee back in.
nestler	a bee's lifecycle phase: handshaking, awaiting the breath that accepts chi:"hello". Verb-state of the same participant.
nestled	a bee's lifecycle phase: admitted by a breath, and sounding and hearing what its role says, for the rest of the connection.

These stack as: hive = kind, installed on a humd; bee = a participant the humd understands through its hive; role = the one job that bee does; nestler and nestled = states of that same bee. Nestler arrives, nestled inhabits: same actor, two phases. A nurse shares its nest with the cells it keeps.

Roles

A bee does one job. So does a honeybee: it moves to another only as its body changes, over days, never between morning and afternoon. The jobs are those of a colony's workers, and worker is the caste they all belong to, never a role. A bee's role is set when its hive enters it and changes only by entering it again, and nothing granted to the old role carries over.

term	meaning
forager	the bee that prompts. It brings the outside world into the thrum, an HTTP / gRPC / SMS / stdio surface, and opens blooms. A tendril for a tool it put on its prompt reaches back to it.
nurse	grows blooms in its cells. It claims the models it serves and its headroom, takes chi:"prompt" and answers with chi:"unfurl"s and a chi:"wilt", reaching tendrils for its cells. All inference is nursing, and what it makes is words.
builder	changes the world. It works the host it is on, running what a bloom composes there: a shell (bash) today, anything executable in time. A bloom says where it builds with its cwd, hum://<humdid>/<path> (hum:///<path> for its forager's own humd), and with no path the shell starts in the home directory of that host. With no cwd it builds at its forager's humd's home if the forager builds, and nowhere otherwise.
attendant	serves the tools it offers, fixed and named, and runs nothing else, whether they read the world or change it. The scents of the models it names are among them. The line with a builder is who writes what runs: on a builder the bloom does, on an attendant the attendant does.

humd

term	meaning
humd	the daemon process, one per machine install. A coordination node: it admits bees, routes between them and gossips with its peers. It hosts no cells.
hid	who a party is: the sha256 of its Ed25519 public key, prefixed by what it is, bee_ for a bee and humd_ for a humd. A tone crossing humds names them by hid in from and to.
thehum	the chi log a humd keeps, signed, sequenced and hash-chained: every tone it heard or sounded, by author. A peer catches up with a backfill, one backfill-event per line.

The nest

Where a nurse's cells live. humd hosts none.

term	meaning
nest	the cells a hive hosts and the limits it keeps them under. A hive turns it on by using hum-nest, and the limits (maxCells, idleMs, cell bounds) are its own, in the nest section of its hives/<hive>.json. A humd hosts no nest.
cell	one live LLM subprocess in a nurse's nest: the compute itself, what grows a chi:"prompt" into chi:"unfurl"s and a chi:"wilt". Fungible: spawn, kill, respawn. The cell is where the hive meets the flower: a comb is made of cells, and so is every plant.
headroom	how many more cells a nurse can take, which it claims on its hello and on each cell pulse. humd sends a prompt to a nurse with room, here or on a peer.
brood	the state machine that walks a cell from cold to ready (PTY-only).

The bloom

term	meaning
bloom	one turn of conversation. Opens with a prompt, grows by unfurls, and closes with a wilt, or breaks off with an error; a cancel closes it early.
unfurl	a petal growing, one tone at a time, until it is closed.
wilt	the bloom closing. It carries the bloom's nectar.
graft	the blooms before a prompt, carried on it for a cell that did not grow them, as a grown branch is joined to new roots and grows on as one plant.
scout	a subagent a cell sends out from its bloom to explore, which comes back with what it found.

How a bloom grows

Said on its prompt.

term	meaning
temperature	how warm the sampling is.
prune	the unlikely tail, cut.
season	how long the bloom may grow.
frost	where it stops.
seed	a seed, for a bloom grown again the same.
trellis	the shape it grows along: a schema, or "json".
tendrils	which tendrils it may reach, and whether several at once.
sepal	how much it reasons first.
scion	the text after it, which it grows to join, as a scion grafted above grows into the stock.

Petals

term	meaning
petal	one unit of content. Its kind says which: text, tendril, grasp, pollen, sepal, waggle, thorn, brix, bouquet.
text	words.
grasp	what a tendril came back with.
pollen	media carried as a petal: one grain.
grain	one piece of image, audio or file: its media type, and its bytes inline or a url to fetch them.
sepal	the cell's reasoning, wrapped around the bloom before it opens.
propolis	the seal on a sepal, so the reasoning carries into the next bloom.
waggle	where a petal's words came from, as a dance points to a source.
thorn	the cell declining, or a filter acting.
brix	how likely each token was, as sugar is read in nectar.
bouquet	several candidate petals gathered for one prompt.
sap	a tendril's input as it is assembled; it grows in an unfurl.

Tendrils

term	meaning
tendril	a brokered tool call. It reaches across the thrum for execution (tendril-reach), and comes back with what it grasped (tendril-result).
bash	the thrum's own shell tendril, served by a builder where the bloom builds.
scent	where a text sits among others: numbers near the scents of texts that mean alike, as a bee knows one flower from another by its smell. Nothing blooms for it, so it is not nursing: an attendant distils it, through the thrum's scent tendril.

Ensemble

term	meaning
ensemble	the mesh of cooperating humds.
gossip	a tone a humd fans to every peer, and each to every other, heard once by its msg_id. How a hive's announcements and the rest of the mesh's news travel.
attach	a forager observing a sid hosted on another humd; the bloom's reply tones fan out to the observer too.
detach	the observer stopping.

Observation

term	meaning
drone	the sentinel watching every tone: self-governance and drift detection.

Measure

term	meaning
comb	the kernel's ledger of what crossed it. Lifetime counters: tone counts per chi (chi:wilt), and nectar per hive. Only the kernel writes the comb, so the measure is observed rather than self-reported.
nectar	the raw intake: tokens in and out, cache reads and writes, per hive (hive:claude-cli:nectar:in).
honey	what the kernel produces; that side belongs to whoever earns it.

Reserved

Words kept for what the hum has not grown yet.

term	meaning
receiver	the bee that makes honey, turning what blooms yield into lasting value. Inference only makes nectar.
species	mason, carpenter, bumble and the rest, kept for a future of their own.