Glossary

The vocabulary, with the distinctions that actually matter - memory vs note vs finding, briefing vs recall, archive vs supersede vs delete.

Terms are listed alphabetically. The ones worth reading even if you think you know them are the four disambiguation entries at the end: each is a pair people routinely use interchangeably, and each pair means genuinely different things.

A–Z

Ambient session - a Seamless session opened automatically by a Claude Code or Codex SessionStart hook, without the agent asking, displayed with an opaque cc/... or cx/... handle. Lifecycle identity uses the full external session ID plus client, not the display handle. Contrast explicit session.

Archive - marking a Seamless memory invalid because it is no longer relevant: it leaves the indexes and stays readable. Proposed by the gardener's staleness pass, never done to a constraint or a pinned stage.

Binding - the association between an MCP connection and a Seamless session, set by session_start; everything on that connection inherits the bound session's project.

Briefing - the <seam-briefing> context block Seamless injects into an agent at session start - constraints, pinned stages, plan rollups, the memory index, recent findings - assembled inside a token budget. See Sessions & briefings.

Claim - an atomic, leased hold on a Seamless task, taken with tasks_claim; exactly one agent can hold a live claim.

Console - Seamless's read-mostly web UI at /console, an observability surface for the human owner; agents use MCP.

Constraint - the Seamless memory kind for a rule the project cannot violate; pinned into every briefing, never dropped for budget, never staleness-archived.

Description - the one-line summary in a Seamless memory's frontmatter, the only text shown in any index and therefore the entire retrieval surface. See Write memories that get recalled.

Digest - a note summarizing a Seamless project's recent activity, proposed by the gardener.

Explicit session - a Seamless session opened by calling session_start; it adopts the ambient session for the same working directory rather than opening a second one.

Family - a set of Seamless projects related by parent/child, so a child's briefing can carry the parent's memories and a sibling's recent findings.

Fail closed - the Seamless rule that a durable write with no resolvable scope is rejected rather than defaulted to global. See Projects & scope.

Fail open - the Seamless rule that a hook never blocks an agent: an internal error still returns success. The cost is that failure is silent.

Finding - what a Seamless session learned, passed to session_end and surfaced in later briefings. Not a memory: a finding is what happened, a memory is what is true.

FTS5 - SQLite's built-in full-text search engine, the keyword half of Seamless recall.

Gardener - the Seamless background pass that finds duplicates, staleness, and drift and proposes fixes; it never acts on its own. See The gardener.

Global - the Seamless scope with no project, visible to every agent in every repo; reached only by passing project: global deliberately.

Kind - a Seamless memory's type: constraint, runbook, protocol, gotcha, decision, refuted, reference, or stage. See Memory & notes.

Lab - a shared Seamless workspace for a systematic investigation, holding trials; opened with lab_open.

Lease - the expiry on a Seamless task claim (default 900 seconds). Re-claiming refreshes it; an expired lease is reclaimable, so a crashed agent does not strand a task.

Memory - in Seamless, a markdown file with YAML frontmatter holding one durable piece of knowledge; the unit that reaches briefings.

Note - in Seamless, a markdown file holding a work artifact - research findings, a meeting summary, a design record; found via recall, never injected into a briefing.

Plan - in Seamless, not a primitive but a composition keyed by plan:<slug>: a narrative note, supporting notes, and step tasks. See Tasks & plans.

Project - the scope a Seamless memory, note, task, or session belongs to; resolved from an explicit argument, a bound session, or the agent's cwd.

Proposal - the Seamless gardener's output: a suggestion for the owner to review, applied only with gardener_apply.

Provenance - the Seamless record of where knowledge came from and what replaced it: source_session, superseded_by, invalid_at.

Ready - a Seamless task with no unfinished blocker; tasks_ready returns exactly those.

Recall - Seamless's single search entry point, fusing FTS5 keyword matching and vector similarity with RRF. Also, loosely, the <seam-recall> block injected on prompt match - see the disambiguation below.

Reproject - moving a Seamless memory to a different project that already exists; moving it to one that does not is a split.

RRF (reciprocal rank fusion) - the method Seamless recall uses to combine the keyword and vector rankings so neither retriever gets a veto.

Session - one agent's stretch of work in Seamless. Sessions heartbeat; an idle one is reaped and marked expired.

Split - dividing one Seamless project into new child projects, creating them and a shared parent; planned as a unit by gardener_split.

Stage - the Seamless memory kind recording where multi-session work stands; pinned into briefings like a constraint.

Supersede - replacing an outdated Seamless memory with a new one: the old is marked invalid, leaves the indexes, and stays readable pointing at its replacement.

Trial - one attempt recorded in a Seamless lab: what was tried, what was expected, what happened.

ULID - the id format Seamless uses everywhere, sortable by creation time. Never UUID.

Four distinctions worth getting right

Memory vs. note vs. finding. A memory is what is true (injected into briefings). A note is what you produced (found by searching). A finding is what a session learned (surfaced as recent activity). The test for the first two: would a future agent need this injected before it starts? Then it is a memory.

Briefing vs. recall injection vs. recall call. All three end with the agent knowing something, which is why they blur. The briefing fires at session start and is unconditional. A recall injection fires on prompt match, mid-turn, still without the agent asking. A recall call is the agent choosing to search. The first two are ambient; only the third is a decision. See Recall.

Ambient vs. explicit session. Ambient is opened by the hook, per agent, automatically. Explicit is session_start, which adopts the ambient one rather than creating a rival.

Archive vs. supersede vs. delete. Archive: no longer relevant, marked invalid, still readable. Supersede: replaced by something specific, marked invalid, still readable, pointing at its replacement. Delete: gone. The rule of thumb - delete is for things that were never true; supersede is for things that stopped being true; archive is for things that stopped mattering.