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 (normalized meaning the call is validated, typed, and expressed in a canonical format independent of the original model output) 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 format contract between the model and the parser — it defines what structure the model output should have (e.g., ReAct text, JSON, XML, or a model-specific harness) so the parser can reliably extract a Decision.

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 (structured metrics about what was compacted, when, and how much context was recovered) 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.