Glossary

Shared language for runs, trajectories, actions, artifacts, replay, and benchmark outputs in QitOS.

Core runtime terms

Run

One invocation of AgentModule.run(...) or an equivalent benchmark execution path that produces a trace directory.

Trajectory

The temporal record of one run: prompts, decisions, tool calls, observations, reductions, and stop conditions across steps.

Observation

The structured data available to the agent after a step. In QitOS this usually includes action results and environment outputs.

Decision

The engine-level semantic output of the agent loop. A decision may contain actions or a final answer.

Action

A normalized tool invocation selected by the agent and executed by the runtime.

Reproducibility terms

Artifact

Any persisted output of a run, especially manifest.json, events.jsonl, steps.jsonl, exported HTML, and benchmark result JSONL.

Replay

Reconstructing and inspecting a previous run from its artifacts with qita replay or the benchmark replay path.

Official run

A run that carries the official QitOS contract: structured specs, standard artifacts, and qita-compatible replay/export behavior.

Benchmark result

A normalized BenchmarkRunResult row with fields such as task_id, benchmark, split, prediction, success, stop_reason, steps, latency_seconds, and run_spec_ref.

Runtime control terms

Tool manifest

The serialized description of the tool surface exposed to the run. It is part of the official-run contract because tool drift changes behavior.

Prompt protocol

The output/input contract expected by the model path, such as ReAct text, JSON, XML, or a model-specific harness.

Parser

The component that converts raw model output into a Decision. The parser must match the prompt protocol.

Context compaction

Any strategy used to shrink accumulated context while keeping a long-running run operational. QitOS records compaction telemetry in the trace.

Inspection terms

qita board

The run index and comparison surface for multiple traces.

qita replay

The single-run temporal playback view.

qita diff

The summary-level comparison view for two runs, focused on stop reason, result, step/event counts, parser diagnostics, config differences, and token/latency/cost summaries.