Glossary

The ubiquitous language for Qren, the agentic operating system. Terms here are canonical: code, docs, and conversation use these words with these meanings. No implementation details — this is a glossary, nothing else.

Business

Deployment house — What the business is: Qren deployments are sold as bespoke, high-touch engagements to businesses ($50–200k initial + monthly retainer), operated and serviced by the Qren team. Qren is the delivery vehicle, not a self-serve mass-market product.
Engagement — One client relationship: the initial deployment plus the ongoing retainer (operation, tuning, new arms).
Early partner — An existing user with a real operating business who gets Qren free in exchange for co-developing an arm against their live operations. The arm factory. Sits at the open end of the access dial: deep Ops access is the price of a free system.
Qren Ops — The deployment team acting inside a client instance: an ordinary principal with granted, audited, client-visible role bindings. Reaches the Qren instance only, never the client’s machine as a whole.
Engagement credential — The activation token that makes an instance a serviced instance. Revoked by Qren’s back end at offboarding or breach.
Frozen instance — An instance whose engagement credential is revoked: keeps running at its current version, loses updates, arms delivery, broker, portal, and support. Nothing deployed is destroyed.

Product

Instance — One installed Qren system serving one owner (person or company). The unit of deployment and sovereignty.
Workspace — A sandboxed tenant inside an instance where one organization or major project lives: its agents, human members, connections, and data. Membership is permission.
Core — The capability systems every instance ships with: memory / knowledge (the brain), work (tasks moving through a chain), chat (humans and agents as peers), drive (one home for files), companion (voice / meetings / live interaction).
Arm — A deployable business-function capability package installed on top of core for a specific client need: bookkeeping, marketing, sales, customer service, finance. Built from core primitives (connections, agents, work, knowledge). Arms are what clients buy; core is what makes arms possible.
Connection — A live link from a workspace to an external system the business already runs on (email, calendar, accounting, ad platforms…). Connections are what give agents real data and real reach.
Appliance — The Qren-configured machine an engagement runs on, installed at the client’s premises (hosted single-tenant as exception). The brain of the instance; sovereignty made physical.
Drive — The workspace-scoped home for a client’s files, living on the appliance. Agents touch it at filesystem speed.
Shadow — The continuous, client-side-encrypted, versioned offsite copy of an instance’s data. Ciphertext to everyone but the client; exists for disaster recovery, never as a second home.
Replication set — The deliberately chosen slice of instance state cached at the edge so the portal can answer read-only when the appliance is unreachable.
Muscles — Ephemeral rented compute the appliance dispatches heavy jobs to. Holds no persistent data. “The brain is sovereign; muscles are rented.”
Engine — A complete agent harness (Claude Code, Codex CLI, Kimi CLI, a local runner) that Qren orchestrates through the ACP socket. Engines are drivers; Qren is the kernel. Never confused with a model.
Agent definition — The binding that makes an agent: identity (principal) + engine + model + effort + persona + skill/tool scope + workspace memberships.
Supervisor — The single background service of an installed Qren; all internal workers run as its supervised children under one bundle identity (one permission grant, one throat to choke).
Edge concierge — The small stateless agent at the edge whose entire world is the replication set: answers status questions and queues work when the appliance is unreachable; can never touch files, connections, or deep memory.
Control API — The rule that every admin action (settings, config, permissions, agent management) exists as an audited, trust-gated API call; the UI is one caller among several. The chief of staff and Qren Ops operate instances through it. No admin action exists only as a button.
Primary work surface — The app’s north star: the place where daily work happens for members — chat, agents, work, knowledge, drive in one collaborative surface — absorbing what teams currently scatter across terminal harnesses and Slack. Reached through the core surfaces, not a year-one scope.
Companion — The capture surface of an instance: meetings and spoken thought recorded, transcribed, and corrected on the appliance, flowing into knowledge, memory, and work. v1 = meeting intelligence + voice command channel; the live multi-pane interaction paradigm is the deferred north star. Quality bar: business-context accuracy, not raw ASR.
Correction loop — The companion’s core mechanism: the instance’s own memory (people, projects, jargon) corrects transcription, speakers, and grammar; the corrected output feeds back into memory. Memory improves transcription; transcription grows memory.
Personal workspace — The workspace auto-created for each human at first run. For an owner it is also home base of the chief of staff and the landing place for cross-workspace synthesis.
Chief of staff — The owner’s cross-workspace agent (name provisional): an ordinary principal homed in the owner’s personal workspace, granted into workspaces the owner chooses, delivering its synthesis only to the owner. There is no privilege tier above workspaces — some principals are simply members of more of them.
Home — The per-viewer aggregation surface: renders briefs, tasks, and mentions across every workspace the viewer belongs to. A computed lens, never a container — it stores nothing, and shrinks instantly when a grant is revoked. (Replaces the “owner layer” phrase, which is retired.)

Unsettled (do not use loosely)

Definition & moat statement — drafted, evidence-graded, parked by the operator for later revision. Do not treat as final.