Glossary

What Open Conduit does introduces Work, Event, Execution, Timer and Wait, Scope, routes, bindings and the toolbelt. This page adds the other terms you meet in the docs, the config and the CLI.

Work and its attempts

• Work: a durable objective, such as an issue to fix or a thread to answer. It outlives any one attempt at it.
• Execution: one attempt to advance a Work, by Claude Code, a shell command or another executor. An attempt that fails doesn’t by itself fail the Work.
• Turn: one Execution of an agent. The agent does what it can, ends the turn with a status (such as building or review) and Open Conduit starts the next turn when there is news.
• Inject: deliver an Event to an attempt that is still running, such as a comment that arrives while the agent works. A route’s active_policy chooses inject, queue, interrupt or drop for news that arrives mid-attempt, and the executor must declare that it can take injected input.
• Resume: start the next turn in the previous turn’s session, so the agent keeps what it knew. An executor declares whether it can resume; one that can’t starts each turn afresh from the Work’s context.
• Handoff: a short note an agent leaves at the end of a turn for whoever takes the Work up next, used when a fresh session starts instead of resuming a cold one.
• Wait: a Work parked until a matching Event arrives (another PR merges, an issue closes) or a time comes. Nothing runs or polls while it waits.

Config

• Scope: one area of work in the config: its connections, secrets, integrations, routes and bindings, and the most its agents may do (authorization).
• Connection: the credentials for one service, such as a GitHub token or a Linear API key. A scope must be granted a connection before it can use it.
• Route: the rule that sends a kind of Event, such as a newly opened issue, to a binding.
• Binding: an executor and exactly what it may do: the operations it may call, its connection, its workspace and its executor’s settings.
• Generation: one applied version of the config. The daemon runs one generation at a time and keeps it across restarts; config apply FILE --generation N makes the file the next one, so an edit to the file changes nothing until it is applied. A GitHub, Linear or Jira issue also gets a new generation when it is reopened, so its reopened life is new Work.
• Playbook: the instructions an agent’s turn starts with, such as work-issue for a GitHub issue or slack-thread for a Slack thread. A binding names it in config.playbook ("-" for none). Playbooks are Claude Code skills: Open Conduit ships its own, a binding’s plugin_dir points at a folder of your own, and a repository can add to one in .open-conduit/playbooks/<name>.md.
• Toolbelt: the operations a run may call, such as github.issue.comment or wait, limited to what its binding allows. Open Conduit checks each call where it serves it, whatever the agent’s instructions say.

GitHub and trackers

• Claim: taking an issue or PR on as Work. Open Conduit labels it (agent-in-progress by default) so another owner leaves it alone.
• Hold: an issue claimed but not started until something happens, such as a time or another PR merging. Held issues carry the scheduled label; take it off to start one early. init github --holds turns holds on.
• Marker: a hidden line in an issue or comment that Open Conduit reads or writes. A hold’s marker, such as <!-- waitFor: pr:12:merged -->, says what the issue waits for; the marker on each agent comment says which Work posted it, so an agent never answers itself and a retried post isn’t made twice. Agents never write markers: they ask for an outcome through the toolbelt.

Other names

• Open Supervisor: Open Conduit’s predecessor. Installing Open Conduit leaves Open Supervisor’s binary, config and state alone.
• os: the toolbelt’s command-line client, installed beside open-conduit and kept off your PATH. Agents and shell commands reach the toolbelt through it.