Glossary
The vocabulary that runs through the rest of the docs. Each entry is a short
definition; follow the link for the page that covers the term in depth. Every
term has its own anchor, so you can deep-link a single definition (for example
glossary/#output-reference).
Core model
Workspace
The magus root directory that owns a set of projects and shared config; the unit
magus operates over. See workspace.
Project
A directory magus recognizes as a unit of work (it has a magusfile); the unit of
caching, scheduling, and dependency tracking. See workspace.
Magusfile
The magusfile.buzz that declares a project's targets (as export funs) and
binds its spells. See targets.
Target
A named operation (build, test, ...) you invoke with magus run <target>; it
may compose a spell's tool-native operations and depend on other targets. See
targets.
Op
A single tool-native command a target composes (long form: operation); the
middle of the work hierarchy (Spell to Op to Target). See
operations.
Spell
A language/runtime adapter (e.g. go, md) that maps generic targets onto a
toolchain's real commands. See spells.
Charm
An execution modifier attached with : (lint:rw) that changes how a target
runs, not which one; the built-in rw flips a check-only target to mutate in
place, and ci always strips it. See charms.
Ward
A coded diagnostic that inspects a resolved op and nudges or blocks an
anti-pattern before it runs. See wards.
Module
A magus stdlib namespace a magusfile imports for host capabilities: filesystem,
exec, vcs, and more. See the module reference.
Buzz
The language magusfiles are written in (the .buzz engine). See
engines.
Engine
The interpreter a magusfile runs on; magus embeds the Buzz engine. See
engines.
Execution and caching
Cache
The content-addressed store magus consults before running a target, so unchanged
work is skipped. See cache.
Affected
The set of projects touched by a change; magus affected <target> runs a target
only over them. See affected.
Sandbox
The restricted filesystem and environment a target runs in, so builds stay
reproducible and side-effect-free. See sandbox.
Service
A long-running or shared process magus manages across runs, distinct from a
one-shot target. See services.
Daemon
The background magus host that owns shared state such as services and the warm
knowledge graph. See daemon.
CI
An ordinary magusfile-defined target you compose yourself with magus\needs -
magus does not hardcode its stages. Magus.RunCI treats it specially only in
that it strips the rw charm, it is the anchor magus affected ci keys off,
and a selected scope with no project declaring it is a load error rather than
a silent no-op. See targets.
Output reference
A short, shareable id (out1a2b3c, "ref" for short) for one target execution's
captured output; it appears on each target's line, and
magus query output out1a2b3c prints those exact bytes. In OpenTelemetry terms
it corresponds to a span (one target execution) within its trace (the
whole magus invocation). See output-refs.
Trace
OpenTelemetry's name for one whole magus invocation; every target it runs is a
span beneath it. See telemetry.
Span
OpenTelemetry's name for one unit of work under a trace - a target execution,
whose sub-operations are child spans. An output reference points at a span's
captured output. See telemetry.
Pool
The concurrency pool: the shared set of slots that caps how many targets run in
parallel on one machine. Its capacity defaults to MAGUS_CONCURRENCY, then 4 on
GitHub-hosted runners, then min(NumCPU, 8); magus status and the
dashboard report it live. See daemon.
Slot
One unit of the pool's capacity. A target acquires the slots it needs to run
(most take one) and releases them when it finishes; the pool tracks capacity
(total slots), running (acquired), and queued (blocked). See
daemon.
Concurrency
How many targets run at once. It is bounded by the pool's capacity and set with
--concurrency, MAGUS_CONCURRENCY, or the concurrency config key. See
daemon.
Queued
A target that wants a slot while the pool is full; it blocks first-in-first-out
until a slot frees. The dashboard colors a sample with queued > 0 accordingly.
See daemon.
Pool mode
Which pool a run uses: daemon (one shared pool the background daemon owns
across every workspace and client) or proc (a per-process pool for a single
one-off invocation). See daemon.
One-off
A single magus invocation that runs a target and exits, using a per-process
pool; the opposite of the long-lived daemon or a service. See
daemon.
Remote cache
A CI-only backend that shares content-addressed artifacts across runners: a cold
machine replays a build another runner already did instead of rebuilding. Every
remote artifact must be signed by a trusted key. See
remote.
Snapshot
A point-in-time view of live state - the pool's occupancy or a tick of exported
metrics - as opposed to accumulated history. See daemon.
Backfill
The recent history the daemon replays to a dashboard on connect, so its charts
start populated instead of empty. It is served from a bounded ring buffer of the
last few hundred samples. See daemon.
Telemetry and health
Latency
How long an operation takes. magus records latency as OpenTelemetry histograms
per family - target execution, cache op, pool wait, and graph query - and reports
each as a count, sum, and percentiles. See telemetry.
Percentile
A latency value at a given rank, interpolated from a histogram's buckets: p50
is the median, p95 and p99 are the tail that most latency budgets care
about. See telemetry.
Health
The at-a-glance daemon state derived from the pool: healthy when the pool is
reporting, degraded when it reports an error, down when there is no pool.
The dashboard color-codes each state. See daemon.
Volatility
A target that fails once and passes on rerun is volatile, as opposed to a
regression that started failing and stays failing. magus keeps per-target
pass/fail history and a Wilson-score volatility rate to tell them apart and
auto-retry the noise. See volatility.
Insight and knowledge
Knowledge graph
The queryable graph of a workspace's spells, targets, docs, and code
relationships; query it with magus query/explain/path. See
knowledge.
MAGUS.md
The committed routing index at a workspace root, regenerated from the knowledge
graph: it lists every node and points at the exact query for a given question,
so it is the entry point an agent reads first. See
knowledge.
Insight
The reports magus derives over the graph and history (hotspots, affinity,
ownership, trend, volatility, unreferenced). See insight.
Hotspot
An insight lens: edit frequency times complexity, the prime refactoring targets.
The project view heat-colors the dependency graph by churn; --files ranks
individual files. See insight.
Affinity
An insight lens: projects that change together (temporal coupling). A pair that
co-changes without either declaring a dependency on the other is a candidate
architectural smell. See insight.
Ownership
An insight lens: author concentration - the primary author and their share, the
distinct-author count (the bus factor), and abandonment. See
insight.
Trend
An insight lens: the recent half of the window against the earlier half. A
positive delta is a rising hotspot; a negative one is cooling. See
insight.
Diagnostic code
A stable MGSxxxx identifier attached to a magus warning or error, so it can be
referenced and looked up; some are guardrails (see wards), others hard
errors.
Design and scope
Two rules named often enough elsewhere to need a definition of their own.
Scope test
The question every proposed capability has to answer: does it read the model
magus already had to build, or does it make magus learn something new about the
world? Reads stay small; acquisitions are where a tool loses its shape. See
scope.
One-vocabulary rule
Each concept gets one name, used everywhere: target, spell, charm, op. A second
word for the same thing is a house dialect, and it costs every reader (and every
agent) a lookup that never ends. See doctrine.
Sessions and leases
The vocabulary of magus watching work happen: who ran what, what an agent is
blocked on, and which agent owns which paths. The policy behind these terms
lives in doctrine.
Session
One magus process's recorded facts - the targets it finished, their outcomes,
and the lease it acted as - kept in a repo-scoped store every worktree shares.
magus session lists them; the store prunes itself by last-fact age.
Attention request
A durable "an agent is blocked" record, opened when a magus session notify
event carries the waiting or permission outcome and held until a person disposes
it. magus session attention lists what is open. Nothing closes one on its own - see
doctrine.
Dispose
The human act of closing an attention request: a judgment rendered, recorded
with who and why. Distinct from resolving a review thread or a merge conflict -
a disposition answers a request; it does not merge anything.
Lease
One row of the lease ledger: a piece of work an orchestrating agent handed
out, with its goal, the checkpoint it was cut against, and the paths it owns or
must not touch. The ledger records; the agent guard is what reads those facts
back when grading a write. See doctrine.
Lease id
The short identifier a worker carries (the --lease flag, or the
magus.lease member of the W3C BAGGAGE environment channel) so its runs,
journal facts, and guard verdicts attribute to its lease. Letters, digits
and -_./: only.
Spawn claim
What a spawning tool said about itself in the environment: TRACEPARENT (the
W3C trace and the parent span this process runs under) and the
magus.spawner baggage member (a label for whoever spawned it). magus records
each verbatim beside the session's own minted span id, and no verdict reads
any of them - the ancestry is a relation between recorded sessions, the way a
process tree is a relation between pids.
Advisor
One read-only check from the advice suite: it reads the changeset through magus
and writes one titled section of findings. The same advisors run as a pull
request comment in CI and inside magus diff --impact locally.
Console
The vocabulary of the browser app. These terms name things you only meet in the
console's UI, so they are defined here rather than left to be inferred from it.
Console
The browser app that reads a magus workspace: a tabbed, tiling page hosting the
log viewer, graph explorer, dashboard, and activity trail. It is a separate
static app, not something the daemon serves - the daemon exposes a loopback API
it calls: read-only views plus one bearer-gated job-control service for
maintenance jobs. See reference/console.
Console app
One of the console's applications (Runs, Log Viewer, Graph Explorer, Dashboard,
Activity Trail, Settings). "App" rather than "page" because one is never a
document you navigate to: it is mounted into a tab, or into a pane beside
another one. Each is single-instance - opening one you already have focuses it
instead of duplicating it.
The glossary term is two words on purpose. As a bare "App" the auto-linker
matched every unrelated "app" in the corpus - a ChatGPT desktop app, a Postgres
app - and pointed each at this definition. See
reference/console.
Pane
A split within a tab. Splitting divides the focused pane along its longer side,
so the same action tiles side-by-side on a desktop and stacks on a phone; a tab
with no split is a single pane. Drag the divider to re-weight the split. See
reference/console.
Chord
A key combination bound to a console command, written mod+k - where mod is
Cmd on macOS and Ctrl elsewhere, so one binding fits both. Every chord is
rebindable (Settings > Keybindings), and a command remains reachable from the
command bar whether or not it has one. See reference/console.
Command bar
The console's runner: one searchable list of every command and its chord,
opened with mod+k. It is the discoverable route to any action - the menus and
chords dispatch the same commands it does. See reference/console.
Live link
The URL that points an app at a running daemon. The daemon serves the console
from its own loopback origin, so the link is that origin plus the app path and
a bearer token in the fragment (http://127.0.0.1:7391/console/graph/#token=...).
The daemon prints it; the console consumes the token, stores it, and strips it from
the URL, so the secret never lingers in history or a copied link. The origin must be
literal loopback - localhost and hostnames are rejected before any request.
Without one, an app
reads only what rides in the link itself. See reference/console.
See also
- Conventions - how to read the placeholders,
shell commands, and admonitions used across these pages.
- Targets - the fuller Target-struct glossary (Path, Name, Files)
for magusfile authors.