Vocabulary

A short glossary of the words you'll see in the app. Each one is just what it says on the tin — there's no hidden complexity.

  • Conversation — Where you describe what you want, in plain language. Like chatting with a developer who happens to be very, very good at reading specs. A conversation can stay informal forever, or you can promote it to a mission when it's concrete enough.

  • Mission — The complete unit of work for one concrete change — usually a conversation that got concrete enough to promote. A mission lives on its own durable branch and holds the runs that build the change. It stays conversable, too: every mission has its own chat, so you can ask it where things stand or steer it mid-flight.

  • Workflow — A reusable, versioned plan, drawn as a graph of nodes in the visual editor. A workflow executes nothing by itself: you attach it to a mission, and it runs there.

  • Run — One execution of a workflow inside a mission, on its own branch. You review each run's result — the diff — and accept or discard it; accepting folds it into the mission. See Lifecycle states.

  • Task — One node of the running plan, materialized as a unit of coder work. A task is an execution snapshot you can inspect: the result, the diff, what it cost, how many attempts it took.

  • Changement — The reversible delta an accepted run adds to the mission. The mission's merge request is the composition of its accepted changements, and each one can be reverted on its own (anything built on top follows, with a confirmation first).

  • Coder — The AI agent that does the work. Each coder runs in its own container, with the model and tools it needs, and pushes its results to the review mirror. Coders come in three variants (standard, browser, android) — the lanes ARDS queues and scales containers in — and a task can additionally draw on shared capability pools (a real browser, an Android emulator, a Windows environment). See How coders work.

  • Review / approval gate — The human-in-the-loop step. Coders push to a review mirror — a separate copy of your repository — and nothing reaches your real repository until you approve it. You approve or reject each batch.

  • Attention request — A signal from the system that a person is needed. Most attention requests come from missions ("approve this plan", "answer this clarification") but they can also fire when a coder gets blocked, or a provider key fails. Attention requests are surfaced in the dashboard and via email.

  • Modification — A change that has been approved and merged through to your origin repo. The Modifications page is the audit trail of "what actually landed". With the run model, each accepted run lands as a reversible changement, and the merge request is their composition.

  • Product — A planned grouping layer above projects. Not in v1: today the top of the tree you'll actually touch is the project/workspace. If you meet the word 'product' in these docs or in chat output, read it as 'a future grouping of projects' — nothing in the current UI points at one.

  • Workspace / project — A repository ARDS knows about. You register one from the Projects page, and can add or switch there later. Each workspace has its own review mirror.

  • GitMirror — The internal service that holds the review-side clones. You'll see "the mirror" in chat messages and review screens; that's GitMirror.

  • Provider — An AI provider you've connected: Anthropic, OpenAI-compatible, Synthetic.new, etc. Providers carry API keys; multiple providers can be connected simultaneously.

  • Model — A specific LLM you can route work to: claude-opus-4-7, claude-haiku-4-5, hf:Qwen/Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct, etc. Different models for different jobs — see Models, providers & costs.

  • Node instructions — Every workflow node can carry extra instructions layered onto its prompt. You set them by hand — per run, per project, per tenant, or globally; the most specific one wins. ARDS proposing a better prompt on its own is not in v1; if that lands, the proposal will arrive as a decision you approve or reject — nothing will ever apply itself.

That's the core vocabulary. A handful more terms exist on advanced pages (the orchestrator, Ghost, Cycle) — see Advanced. They're optional reading.