| Work Unit | The primary execution abstraction: Goal + Branch. Every agent session is scoped to exactly one work unit. |
| Projection | Agent-consumable derived views of the DAG. Agents never consume raw history — they request projections at configurable compression levels (Full / Normal / Compact / Emergency). |
| Branch | Isolated workspace for speculative work. Changes are made on branches, not directly on authoritative state. |
| Merge Proposal | Structured intent to reconcile branch changes into the authoritative branch. Includes diff, artifact lineage, execution event, and verification results. |
| Known Good State | A verified branch checkpoint used for rollback and recovery. |
| Room | Sync boundary for multi-peer NodalMerge replication. |
| Review Policy | Per-work-unit setting (Human Required / Agent Approval / Hybrid) controlling who approves a proposal before it applies. |
| Candidate Branch | Optional safety layer: when promotion branches are enabled, applies land here instead of main until a human explicitly promotes. |
| Candidate Conflict / Task Conflict | Two proposals landing on the candidate branch (or two sibling work units under the same goal) touching the same file paths. Resolved by reconciling, restarting the losing goal, or resolving manually — see Trust & autonomy → Reconciling candidate conflicts. |
| Experiment | A parent work unit fanned out into 2+ sibling forks (different model, architecture, library, or product framing) that run in parallel for comparison. |
| Steering | Pausing a running work unit and injecting a constraint, which forks a sibling that resumes with it — the original’s decision log is never rewritten. |
| Counterfactual | A sibling work unit branched from a completed proposal’s base state and re-run under a different model/profile for comparison. |
