Glossary
Covenant is built around a fixed vocabulary. These are the canonical definitions of the eight host-level primitives and the core artifacts agents exchange. Each term links to its reference documentation.
- Intent
- An intent is a natural-language request addressed to the Covenant daemon. It carries a stable UUID, an issuer AgentId, a timestamp, a priority, and an optional parent, and is routed by keyword overlap with a deterministic echo fallback.
- Runtime
- The runtime is the mechanism that executes an agent. Today it spawns each agent as a child process exchanging JSON over stdin/stdout under a wall-clock budget with hard preemption, behind a small trait designed to back stricter isolation such as gVisor or Firecracker.
- Memory
- Memory is a three-tier semantic store — working, episodic, and long-term — with cosine-similarity search over embedded vectors. Records are SQLite-backed in production and carry a UUID, tier, owner, result text, embedding, metadata, and timestamp.
- Identity
- Identity is a single ed25519 keypair per Covenant install. The same key signs capability grants, signs Solana settlement transactions, and appears as the daemon's issuer on audit events and memory records.
- Permissions
- Permissions are capability tokens. Each token names a dotted action from a reserved namespace and an optional JSON scope, is signed with ed25519 over a deterministic encoding, and is enforced at dispatch and audited regardless of outcome.
- Comms
- Comms is how agents and clients communicate with the daemon and one another. Three transports exist today: local IPC over a Unix socket, an HTTP gateway on 127.0.0.1:8421, and MCP and A2A adapters for tools and agent-to-agent traffic.
- Compositor
- The compositor is how agent state, decisions, and results are surfaced to a human operator. It covers the operator console, this public landing and documentation surface, and the covenant-tui terminal binary — all reading the same daemon with no privileged shortcut around the IPC and HTTP surfaces.
- Settlement
- Settlement is how resource consumption is accounted for. Covenant records local SettlementReceipt rows today; chain fields remain empty unless a settlement integration records them, and a Solana program provides the scaffold for networked settlement.
- Audit
- Audit is the evidence layer that underlies identity, permissions, and settlement rather than a standalone primitive. Audit events are append-only JSONL rows with structured kinds, issuers, timestamps, and local hash-chain integrity reports.