Plain words

For the agent; never shown or sent to the person. Say the plain word. When a link, screen or command output puts a Tessl term in front of the person, say what it means in one line, once, at that point, and only when it bears on what they do next. Do not define a term the person will not meet.

Names on screens

• Implement ticket, Shepherd PR, Follow ticket changes: the Loops page's names for ship tickets, answer reviews and fix checks, and follow ticket changes.
• Agent Retro, Review Development Patterns: older names on the Loops page for Learn from agent runs and Learn from review feedback.
• Tessl Verify check: the check on a pull request that reports what the verifiers found.
• run label, such as issue-labelled #5 @ada: what started the run, the issue or pull request, and who acted.
• clone, manifest-sync, skill-install, cloud-launch-setup: the steps before the agent starts: get the repository, sync its config, install the skill, run the setup script. A run can fail at any of them.
• Closes #N, in a pull request Tessl opened: tells GitHub to close issue N when it merges.
• #N: pull request or issue number N in this repository.

Tessl words

• automation: one rule: when this happens, an agent does this job. Tessl shows it as a Loop.
• project: the repository's home in Tessl, where its automations and runs live.
• the Tessl App: the GitHub App that lets agents write to the repository, also shown as github-app-agent.
• Tessl Reviewer: the GitHub App that runs Code Review, also shown as github-app-code-review.
• cloud environment: the machine and access the agent gets in Tessl's cloud; Tessl makes one per automation.
• answer reviews and fix checks: on Tessl's pull requests, an agent answers review comments and fixes failing checks (shepherd).
• shepherd round: one pass over a pull request after a review or a check result.
• issue source: where tickets come from, GitHub issues or Linear.
• the tessl label: the GitHub label that starts a run; Tessl creates it, and adding it needs triage access to the repository.
• cloud check: one cloud run that runs the setup script to prove it works before it merges; it uses credits.
• finding: one recorded problem that keeps coming back, with its evidence and the fix to make.
• lens: a set of review rules Code Review applies to the paths it covers.
• review profile: .tessl-code-review.yml, which says which lenses review which paths.
• verifier: a pass-or-fail rule the repository keeps, judged by a model on the files it covers; agents run it before they push, and it reports on pull requests once verification is turned on for the repository.
• tessl.json: the file in the repository that holds Tessl's configuration.

Skills and plugins

• prepare-repo: the skill that reads review history and CI failures and proposes agent context, checks and review rules.
• understand-factory: the skill that explains what the factory did and why a run failed.
• change-factory: the skill that changes or extends the factory.
• tessl/factory: the published skills the automations run.
• tessl/learn-from-past-work: the published skills Learn from past work runs.
• tessl/code-review, tessl/tessl-verify: plugins installed to the person's account, not the repository, to write review rules and checks.
• tessl-factory/: the repository's own copy of a skill, which no longer gets Tessl's fixes.
• @tessl-code-review: a comment that is only this handle asks Code Review to review the pull request again.