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.

Consent purpose — One named permission for one optional network or execution capability, recorded in .prism/consent.json. There is no master switch. See consent and privacy.

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. Determines which domain screens appear. See DNA and stack.

Domain — A broad area of a repository: frontend, backend, data, infrastructure. Detected, not configured. See Investigate a domain.

Envelope — A local JSONL ledger of Intelligence calls: tool, counts, truncated, bytes. Never source. Shown on Console Iris. See Envelope.

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 queueable 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, screen, 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/cache/index.sqlite. Every answer derives from it. See the repository index.

Iris — The accumulated knowledge of a workspace: the index, graphs, DNA, landmarks, health, findings, and memories. Console #/iris shows facts plus the Envelope scoreboard — not the repository map. An aperture, not a persona — never first person, never an avatar. See Envelope and Iris.

Spectrum — The browser intelligence app (formerly Playground) that indexes the Dispatch-selected repository. The same map appears in the IDE. Console Iris no longer mounts that map — it shows facts and Envelope instead.

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.

Layer — An overlay on the map that colours structure by one dimension: coupling, churn, tests, risk, ownership, features.

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.

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, map-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.

Surface — A way of using Prism: the extension, the CLI, the MCP server, the Spectrum app. 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.

Working set — Files, symbols, decisions, and graph neighbors kept so a compacted chat or job resume does not rediscover context. See Remember context.

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

Zoom level — Where the map is aggregated: repository, package, feature, file or symbol. Each level re-aggregates rather than rescaling.