Glossary

Donna-specific terms and their definitions.

Term	Definition	See Also
Action handler	A chat engine plugin that intercepts natural-language commands (e.g., "show my tasks") and translates them into API calls. Registered via the ActionRegistry.	Chat
Automation	A cron-dispatched recurring skill execution with cadence policy and pause/resume lifecycle.	Skill System
BudgetGuard	The pre-call gate that checks spend against daily (\(20) and monthly (\)100) thresholds before allowing an LLM invocation.	Cost, Handle Budget Breach
Capability	A unit of agent functionality (e.g., task_create, email_draft) with defined tool access and autonomy level.	Agents, Skill System
Challenger	A second model invocation used to verify high-stakes outputs via a compare-and-decide pattern.	Model Layer
Circuit breaker	A resilience pattern that stops retrying a failing service after consecutive failures, entering an open state until a cooldown expires.	Resilience
Collection	The subsystem that captures full LLM request/response payloads to disk for forensic analysis via Claude Inspector.	Collection
Correction	A user-initiated change to a task field (priority, due date, etc.) that the preference system observes and learns from.	Preferences
CorrectionSubscriber	The event-driven listener that detects task field changes and logs them as corrections for preference learning.	Preferences
Dedup	Deduplication of incoming tasks via fuzzy title matching and LLM semantic comparison against existing tasks.	Task System
Escalation gate	The over-budget decision UI (Approve $X / Manual / Pause / Cancel) that replaces the simple pause-only behavior.	Cost
Evictor	The PayloadEvictor component that enforces disk budget by deleting oldest payload files when storage exceeds thresholds.	Collection
GPU tracker	Monitors Ollama GPU memory usage on the RTX 3090 to inform model routing decisions.	LLM Gateway
Invocation log	The invocation_log SQLite table that records every LLM call with model, latency, tokens, cost, and task context.	Observability, Model Layer
Memory vault	A Git-backed knowledge store that chunks, embeds, and indexes content from tasks, chat, and corrections for semantic retrieval.	Memory Vault
Model alias	A logical name (e.g., task_parse, chat_respond) mapped to a specific model + parameters in config/donna_models.yaml.	Model Layer
ModelRouter	The central abstraction that routes all LLM calls through alias lookup, budget checking, and structured logging.	Model Layer
needs_scheduling	Task state for a time-bound task the scheduler could not place before its deadline — surfaced explicitly instead of stranding in backlog.	Task System
Orchestrator	The central dispatcher that receives user messages, classifies intent, and routes to the appropriate skill or handler.	Orchestrator
Payload	The full JSON capture of an LLM request (prompt, parameters) and response (output, tokens, latency) stored by the collection subsystem.	Collection
Priority engine	Computes dynamic task priority from urgency, importance, dependencies, and user corrections.	Scheduling
Routing gate	The deterministic, LLM-free gate that routes a freshly captured task to the scheduler (time-bound), automation (recurring), or backlog (undated) based on its time intent and priority.	Scheduling
Rule applier	The preference subsystem component that applies learned rules (from corrections) to new tasks at creation time.	Preferences
Shadow preference	A candidate preference rule extracted from corrections that needs validation before becoming active.	Preferences
Skill	A YAML-defined unit of work with steps, tool access, model routing, and validation. The atomic unit of Donna's capability system.	Skill System, Run a Skill
Slice	A build increment with defined acceptance criteria and spec references, used to scope implementation work.	Development: Slices
State machine	The configurable task lifecycle defined in config/task_states.yaml that governs valid transitions between states.	Task System
Supabase sync	Async write-through replication from local SQLite to a Supabase Postgres instance for cloud access and backup.	Integrations
TaskEventBus	The pub/sub system that broadcasts task lifecycle events (created, updated, completed) to subscribers like CorrectionSubscriber.	Task System, Preferences
Time intent	The structured representation of when a task should happen (exact / window / constrained / recurring / none), emitted by the parser and stored as time_intent_json. Drives the routing gate and derives deadline / deadline_type.	Task System
Tool dispatch	The validation layer where models propose tool calls and the orchestrator validates and executes them. Models never call tools directly.	Agents, Skill System
WAL mode	SQLite Write-Ahead Logging mode, enabling concurrent reads during writes. All Donna SQLite databases use WAL.	Architecture: Overview