H·AI·K·U Glossary
Quick reference for all H·AI·K·U terminology and concepts.
B
- BackpressureSee in paper
- Quality enforcement via hooks that block the agent from proceeding until standards are met, rather than relying on agent compliance.
- BoltSee in paper
- One cycle through a stage's hat sequence for a unit. If completion criteria are not met, another bolt runs. Tracked as `iteration` in state.
C
- Completion CriteriaSee in paper
- Verifiable conditions that define when a unit is done. Expressed as checkboxes in unit markdown. Quality gates enforce machine-verifiable criteria; adversarial review enforces the rest.
D
- DAG
- Directed acyclic graph ordering units within a stage by their dependencies.
H
- Hat
- A behavioral role scoped to a stage. Each hat runs in a fresh agent context with instructions loaded from `stages/{stage}/hats/{hat}.md`.
I
- IntentSee in paper
- The top-level initiative being pursued. Contains units organized by stages. Stored at `.haiku/intents/{slug}/intent.md`.
P
- Persistence Adapter
- Backend that handles how work is stored and delivered. Implementations: git (branches, commits, pull requests) and filesystem (local directories).
Q
- Quality GateSee in paper
- A machine-verifiable check (test, lint, typecheck, build) enforced by the Stop hook. Blocks the agent from stopping until gates pass.
R
- Review Agent
- A specialized adversarial agent that evaluates stage output against a specific mandate (e.g., correctness, security, accessibility). Defined per-stage in `review-agents/{name}.md`. Stages can include review agents from other stages via `review-agents-include`.
- Review Gate
- A checkpoint between stages. Types: `auto` (proceed), `ask` (require human approval), `external` (require external review), `await` (block until an external event occurs).
S
- Stage
- A lifecycle phase within a studio. Contains hat definitions, review gate, input/output contracts, and unit type constraints.
- Studio
- A named lifecycle template mapping the four-phase model to domain-specific stages. Defines stage order, persistence type, and delivery mechanism.
U
- UnitSee in paper
- A discrete piece of work within an intent, scoped to a single stage. Has verifiable completion criteria and dependency relationships forming a DAG.