Gas City runs a customer-owned factory on Beads; the terms below distinguish the work graph, the factory configuration, the agent processes, and the records they produce.
For project and community names, use the Gas City ecosystem name map. This page defines the product and technical vocabulary.
Agent
A configured coding agent. In Gas City, the agent definition can name its prompt, provider, model, permissions, skills, and related setup. An agent is configuration; a session is the running process.
Role names such as planner and reviewer come from the pack rather than a fixed Gas City catalog.
Agent work management
The management of durable work, relationships, and readiness outside any agent session. Beads provides this layer. Orchestration advances the work through agents, workflows, gates, and recovery.
Automation
A factory action that starts on a schedule, an event, a condition, or a manual trigger. Order is Gas City’s technical term for an automation definition.
Bead
A durable unit of structured agent work. A bead records fields such as title, status, priority, assignee, notes, and relationships to other work. It survives the coding-agent session that created or updated it.
Beads
The open protocol for durable agent work and the open-source work-state substrate behind that protocol. The bd CLI is its default client. Beads stores work; it does not execute agents or orchestrate workflows.
See the Beads Guide and Beads core concepts.
Beads Team Server
The commercial team product for sharing and governing beads, available in preview through design partnerships as managed SaaS or self-hosted inside the customer’s VPC. The preview adds governed shared work, provenance, visibility, and APIs while letting customers keep their agents and workflows. It captures Runs in the organization’s shared location and stores them for the retention period the organization chooses.
Claim
An atomic assignment operation in Beads. bd update <id> --claim sets the assignee and marks work in progress only if another agent has not already claimed it. Claims prevent two agents from silently taking the same ready work.
Convoy
A bead-backed grouping of related work used to track a larger delivery. A convoy provides grouping and lineage; it should not be described as an atomic multi-repo merge.
Dependency
A typed relationship between beads. Blocking relationships affect ready work. Other relationships record hierarchy, provenance, validation, or a softer connection without necessarily blocking anything.
Dolt
The version-controlled SQL database used by current Beads. Embedded mode runs inside the bd process for a single writer. Server mode supports concurrent writers. With Gas City’s default bd work-store provider, Dolt is the source of truth for the Beads work graph.
Event
An immutable notification fired by Gas City activity. Events can be listed, followed as a stream, and resumed from a cursor. They support local observation and automation; they are not the Beads work record or a retained commercial Run.
See the Gas City events reference.
Factory
The customer’s configuration of agents, workflows, automations, prompts, skills, packs, and related settings. The customer owns the factory. Gas City and Gasworks are platforms that run it.
Formula
Gas City’s technical definition of a workflow: a readable TOML graph that declares steps, dependencies, routing, and control flow. Cooking or applying a formula materializes the workflow as beads that the orchestrator can drive outside the initiating session.
Gas City
The MIT-licensed open software factory platform that runs on Beads. Gas City orchestrates configured coding agents through repeatable workflows and automations on an individual developer’s infrastructure.
Gasworks
The multi-operator factory platform. Gasworks includes Beads Team Server and will let multiple operators use, observe, and improve one shared factory. It is coming soon as managed SaaS or self-hosted inside the customer’s VPC.
Gate
A condition that must be satisfied before dependent work proceeds. A Gas City formula gate materializes as a blocking bead. A person can close it manually, or customer automation can close it after observing CI, a pull request, a timer, mail, or another external condition. Gas City accepts those type labels but does not ship type-specific watchers for them today.
Local run
A lowercase local run is an addressable graph-workflow execution. Gas City materializes it as a root bead and child step beads, then the dashboard and API project its state by folding retained bead lifecycle events and adding live or linked execution detail. That local view is not a separately governed organizational Run.
Operator
A human who engineers and runs a software factory around the organization’s practices, then improves it for quality, cost, and speed. Agents execute work; operators run the factory.
Order
Gas City’s technical automation definition. An order pairs a trigger with an action. The action may instantiate a formula or run a configured command.
See the orders tutorial.
Orchestration
The system that advances durable work through agents, workflows, gates, and recovery while processes come and go. Agent work management holds the work, relationships, and readiness; orchestration drives execution. In Gas City, the orchestrator materializes workflows as beads and advances ready steps through the graph.
Pack
A reusable bundle of factory configuration: agent templates, workflows, automations, prompts, and supporting assets. Packs capture inspectable engineering judgment. The local city is itself a root pack and can import shared packs.
See Understanding packs.
Provider
In an agent definition, a provider is the named CLI coding-agent preset: its executable, arguments, environment, model options, readiness behavior, and resume support. Gas City also has provider seams for the session runtime, bead store, events, mail, usage, and external messaging. Use the full term when the context could be ambiguous, and say model provider for the LLM vendor.
Ready frontier
The work that an agent can claim now because it has no open blocker. Beads computes this frontier with bd ready; it is more specific than a list of every open task. The CLI displays at most 100 results by default, so exhaustive automation should pass --limit 0.
Registry
The named place at registry.gascity.com where public packs are published and installed. Registry is a capability and location, not a separate product. Gasworks will include a team Registry that combines public and private packs.
Rig
A project, repository, or workspace registered with Gas City. A rig gives work and configured agents a project scope.
Run
In the Beads Team Server preview, a capitalized Run is the operational record for executing one or more related beads. It connects the work to the agent sessions, artifacts, outcomes, and available provider-reported usage records captured around the execution. Beads Team Server stores it in the organization’s shared location for the retention period the organization chooses. A Run is private to the customer’s organization and is never a billing unit.
Session
A live coding-agent process. Sessions start, stop, compact, crash, and disappear. Durable work remains in Beads.
Software factory
A repeatable system that turns engineering intent into reviewed work through customer-owned agents, workflows, automations, prompts, skills, and packs. A factory is more than a group of terminals because the process and work state exist outside any one session.
The AI software factory guide gives the full definition.
Workflow
A repeatable path for agent work. It may include sequential steps, parallel work, blocking dependencies, retries, and human review. Gas City’s technical workflow definition is a formula.
Work graph
Beads connected by parent-child structure, blocking dependencies, provenance, validation, and other typed relationships. The graph lets agents distinguish ready work from open-but-blocked work and preserve how newly discovered tasks relate to the job that exposed them.
See why coding agents need a work graph and the Beads dependency docs.
Put the terms to work
Use the Beads Quickstart to create and relate durable work. Use the Gas City Quickstart to route that work through a configured coding agent.
Related articles
- Gas City product and community map: Find the products, Registry, documentation, GitHub projects, and Discord community.
- Beads: Read the complete product narrative behind bead, work graph, and ready frontier.
- Why coding agents need a work graph: See hierarchy, blocking, provenance, and readiness in one example.
- Software factory reference architecture: Place the defined terms in the current system map.