Glossary

Band — A risk score sorted into Low, Moderate or High. One definition, shared by every surface. See risk bands.

Blast radius — Everything a change to one file or symbol could affect: dependents, tests, features, and a risk band. See Before you edit.

Churn — How much an area has changed recently, from git history. Unavailable without git, including in shallow clones.

Confidence — How much evidence agreed on an inference, as a percentage. Used on features and stack detection. Low confidence means it is a guess.

Dependency graph — Files as nodes, imports as edges. The structural spine that impact analysis is computed from. See graphs.

DNA — The identity of a repository: languages, frameworks, domains, and conventions. See DNA and stack.

Estimated — Inferred rather than measured. Directionally useful; not precise. Marked as such wherever it appears. See signal provenance.

Feature — A group of files that appear to implement one capability, inferred from imports, naming and structure. Repositories do not declare these. See graphs.

Finding — A concrete issue (unused export, duplicate implementation, wrapper) identified by a fingerprint. Resolved only when a re-scan drops that fingerprint. See Findings.

Guard — Rank of this session’s dirty files by blast risk, minus pre-existing dirt. See Guard a session.

House Style — Three exemplars (canonical, recent, older) for how this repo already does a pattern — route-handler, component, colocated-test, worker. Returned by Prepare. See Prepare a change.

Hotspot — High churn crossed with high complexity. The intersection is what matters; neither metric alone identifies it.

Index — Prism's parsed copy of your repository, in ~/.prism/workspaces/<key>/cache/index.sqlite. Every answer derives from it. See the repository index.

Knowledge graph — Semantic relationships beyond imports: what a symbol is, what it relates to, what it belongs to. See graphs.

Landmark — A notable place in a repository — an entry point, a hub, a boundary. What you would point at while explaining the codebase to someone new.

Living AGENTS.md — A contributor sheet generated from the index into ~/.prism/workspaces/<key>/agents.md only. Never written into git. See Remember context.

Measured — Read from real output rather than inferred. The counterpart to estimated.

Memory — A note about the repository saved with prism remember, optionally anchored to a symbol or path. Prepare hands it back. See Remember context.

MCP — Model Context Protocol, the standard by which an AI client calls external tools. Prism ships an MCP server. See using MCP.

Orphan — A file left dead because the only thing reaching it was deleted. Reported by safe delete. Guard also flags a new file with no inbound imports. See Delete safely.

Pack — The ranked file list from prepare_change: paths, symbols, why, token weights. Not file bodies. See Prepare a change.

Prepare — One call before an edit: pack + reuse + House Style + notes + work order. CLI prism prepare. See Prepare a change.

Provenance — Whether a value was measured, estimated, or is unknown. See signal provenance.

Receipt — What the stop hook prints when the agent stops: the checks the change reached, and a verdict: SHIP, NOT PROVEN or NO-SHIP.

Surface — A way of using Prism: the MCP server and hooks, the CLI, the GitHub Action. All of them consume the same engine and compute nothing themselves.

Unavailable — Prism does not know this, and says so instead of showing zero. A repository with no coverage report and one with genuinely zero coverage are not the same repository.

Work order — In-scope, off-limits (generated/vendor), and needs-sign-off paths for a task. Advisory unless an Accepted ADR arms the write veto. See Prepare a change.

Workspace — The repository Prism is analysing, and the boundary it will not read outside of.