Glossary
Shared terms across Little Harness, Little Workflow, Little Compute and LittleDB, and where each product uses the same word differently.
Each product also has its own glossary with more detail:
Harness,
Workflow and
Compute concepts.
These are different things. A Compute Task can host a Harness Session, and a
Harness agent can start a Workflow Run, but none of them is another name for the
others.
| Term | Product | Meaning |
|---|
| Harness Session | Harness | One agent conversation or job, with a private /session/ workspace. The caller owns the transcript and resends messages each turn. |
| Turn | Harness | One generateHarness() or streamHarness() call within a session. |
| Workflow Run | Workflow | One durable execution of a workflow version, recorded as events in a World. |
| Operation | Compute | One user intent and its bounded agent graph. |
| Task | Compute | One logical unit of agent work. It may have zero or more retry Attempts. |
| Attempt | Compute | One durable try at a Task. It keeps lineage and a File Snapshot generation even while it holds no compute. |
| Sandbox Lease | Compute | A time-bounded attachment to one isolated execution environment. An Attempt may hold sequential Leases, never more than one writable attachment. |
| Term | Product | Meaning |
|---|
| Local Host | Harness | The local host for sessions, traces, artifacts and Persistent Dirs, stored under a data directory you choose. |
| Persistent Dir | Harness | A directory checked out into each session and committed back at a commit boundary. |
| World | Workflow | Where Workflow stores run events and state. Local World is the default and records events in an embedded SQLite store. |
| File Snapshot | Compute | Little-owned durable workspace state. A provider or VM snapshot is only an optional acceleration. |
| Artifact | All | A stored file outside the model's context. In Harness, a file under /artifacts/ such as a large tool result; in Workflow, a run output with an ID and manifest; in Compute, a content-addressed blob with retention rules. |
| Memory | Harness, Workflow | Two different features. Harness memory is opt-in, model-authored memory backed by a Persistent Dir. Workflow Memory Stores are filesystem collections mounted at /mnt/memory/... for planners. |
| Term | Product | Meaning |
|---|
| Harness | Harness | The runtime createHarness() builds. In Workflow pages, "harness" also names the runtime each workflow role (planner, worker, fixer) runs in. |
| Agent folder | Harness | A folder with agent.ts plus tools/ and skills/, loaded by the little-harness CLI or loadHarness(). |
| LWIR | Workflow | The JSON workflow format the planner drafts and the validator checks. |
| WorkflowVersion | Workflow | An immutable, validated workflow that runs execute. |
| Version | LittleDB | One state of a harness or workflow as plain JSON content, such as { system, model }. An app resolves which version to run; the config in its code is the bootstrap that becomes version 1. Private source. |
| Proposal | LittleDB | A candidate version with a rationale and evidence, gated by an experiment or a trial and approved by policy or a person. Private source. |
| Eval worker | LittleDB | The loop in your app that claims LittleDB's experiment runs, runs a version on a dataset item and reports scores. Private source. |
| User feedback | LittleDB | What an app's end users said about a turn (a thumbs, a rating, a comment, survey answers), stored as scores with source user and weighed by reviews, trials and rollback next to the judges. Private source. |
| Term | Meaning |
|---|
| Port | An optional Harness integration point you can supply yourself, such as the execution environment or the durable session log. Little Compute implements several in its unpublished source. None is required. |
| Agent Group | A parent agent's bounded set of child agents. The Harness agents option that starts one is UNRELEASED; Little Compute's Agent Groups are unpublished source. |
| UNRELEASED | Exists only in the current source. No npm version includes it, and no version number has been assigned. See Releases. |