# Terminology

Glossary of vocabulary this company has actually settled on, so new agents (and humans) reading
this repository don't have to infer meaning from context. See [../MEMORY.md](../MEMORY.md).

| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| **Founder** | The human owner of Local LLC. Final authority on strategic direction. See `../FOUNDER.md`. |
| **Executive Office** | The Founder's strategy/brainstorming partner (currently an LM Studio "Bionic" model). Explicitly *not* part of the company — outside the chain of command. |
| **Approval gate** | The point where the Founder must say yes before a plan becomes company work. Nothing reaches Plane before this. See `../FOUNDER.md`. |
| **CEO** (agent role) | First role inside the company to see an approved plan. Creates Epics, sets milestones and priority, authorizes sprints. Does not write code. |
| **Project Manager** | Owns Plane operationally: breaks Epics into Stories/Tasks, assigns work, runs sprints, tracks velocity/blockers. Never writes code or makes architecture calls. (Formerly referred to as "Chief of Staff" and, separately, a "Program Manager/PMO" role during early brainstorming — both were consolidated into this single role.) |
| **Architect** | Technical design authority; approves ADRs; resolves engineering disagreements; peer to the Project Manager, not its superior. |
| **Employee / AI employee** | Any AI agent filling a defined role in `../ORGANIZATION.md`, with its own Plane account, Gitea identity, memory, and prompt. |
| **Epic** | Top-level unit of approved work in Plane, created only by the CEO from a Founder-approved plan. |
| **Story** | A coherent slice of an Epic, created by the Project Manager. |
| **Task** | The assignable unit of work engineers claim and close; child of a Story. |
| **ADR** (Architecture Decision Record) | A permanent record of a decision with lasting technical consequence. See `../DECISIONS.md`. |
| **RFC** | A proposal under discussion, not yet a decision — may become an ADR if accepted. See `templates/RFC.md`. |
| **Security hold** | A Plane label attached by the Security Engineer that blocks a merge until the Security Engineer or Founder clears it. |
| **Source of truth** | The one system responsible for a given kind of state — see the table in `../COMPANY.md`. Nothing is allowed to duplicate another system's source of truth. |