Glossary
Carina terms — session, profile, capability, patch, worker, and more.
Short definitions for terms used across the docs. For product positioning see Overview.
Session
Section titled “Session”A durable unit of work bound to a workspace root and a permission profile. Created with session.create. Holds tasks, events, and audit history.
Workspace
Section titled “Workspace”The repository (or directory) tree the session is allowed to touch. Bound at session creation; policy resolves paths against it.
Profile
Section titled “Profile”A named permission bundle (e.g. safe-edit, read-only) evaluated by the capability kernel for every side effect.
Capability
Section titled “Capability”One of the fourteen gated action types (FileRead, CommandExec, PatchApply, MemoryWrite, SubagentSpawn, …). Every meaningful effect maps to a capability check.
Permission decision
Section titled “Permission decision”Kernel result: allow, deny, or require-approval. Recorded on the audit trail and referenced by side-effect events.
Agent loop
Section titled “Agent loop”ReAct-style cycle: model proposes an action → kernel authorizes → tools execute → observation returns. The model decides; it does not bypass the kernel.
Sub-agent
Section titled “Sub-agent”An isolated child run with attenuated capabilities (never more than the parent). Spawned via SubagentSpawn / spawn tooling.
Worker
Section titled “Worker”A remote or local executor process that polls work under credentials and lease fencing. See Workers.
A transactional file mutation with provenance and a rollback pointer. Preferred write path under safe-edit (via PatchApply).
Audit / event log
Section titled “Audit / event log”Append-only, session-scoped log of decisions and effects. Supports hash-chain verification (carina audit verify).
Item stream
Section titled “Item stream”Normalized projection of session activity for UIs and SDKs (distinct from raw audit replay).
Daemon
Section titled “Daemon”Local process (carina-daemon) that owns sessions, policy evaluation, and the audit store.
Gateway
Section titled “Gateway”Optional HTTP surface that exposes scoped JSON-RPC / agent APIs when explicitly enabled — not required for local TUI use.
Model Context Protocol servers/tools mediated by Carina so external tools still hit policy and audit.
Nebutra Cloud boundary
Section titled “Nebutra Cloud boundary”Optional identity/sync layer around Carina. Local machine remains authority for execution and policy.
Source of truth
Section titled “Source of truth”- Product terms:
docs/product.md· map:apps/docs/FEATURE_MAP.md - Security primitives:
docs/security-model.md· Policy · Audit - Related: Runtime architecture · CLI reference
- Overview — product framing
- Common workflows — recipes using these terms
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