Glossary

Each entry is the short version. The link goes to the page that explains it.

Packages

Harness. A coding agent uze delivers to: Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode or Antigravity. See Harnesses.

Plugin (package). What you install once. A directory holding skills, MCP servers, agents and hooks. See Creating a plugin.

Marketplace. A Git repository with a marketplace.json, remote or cloned locally. Every plugin is resolved through one. uze-official ships inside the binary.

Store. Where uze keeps a plugin's bytes, under ~/.uze/store. The single source of truth. No harness reads it directly.

Capability. One kind of thing a plugin declares: a skill, an MCP server, an agent or a hook. See Plugin format.

Invocation policy. Who may run a skill: the model, the user, or both. The invoke: {model, user} block in SKILL.md.

Trust. Your approval for anything a plugin can execute: MCP commands and hook handlers. You are asked before they are installed.

Delivery

Integration. The part of uze that knows one harness. Everything vendor-specific lives there.

Delivery route. How a capability reaches a harness. The first that works wins, in this order: native, generated native, safe adaptation, unsupported. See How delivery works.

Envelope. A harness's own plugin format. The one a plugin ships is used, or one is generated when it is missing.

Projection. Writing a harness's own view of something uze owns: a plugin directory, a config entry, a bridge. A projection can always be deleted and rebuilt.

Receipt. The record of an artifact uze placed. Only what a receipt says it owns is ever changed or removed. See How delivery works.

Drift. An owned artifact that no longer matches its receipt. It is reported, and nothing overwrites it.

Shim. A link in ~/.uze/shims that starts the real harness binary, used only by the workspace: its panes put the shims first on PATH, and no shell of yours is edited. It brings an agent back to its conversation after a reboot, and carries a project's .agents/ into a harness that does not read it. Experimental. See Terminal.

Projects

Machine scope. What lives in ~/.uze: the store, your agents' setup, marketplaces and configuration. -m makes a command act on it alone.

Project scope. What lives in a project: agents.yaml, agents.lock and AGENTS.md. A command run inside a project maintains them.

agents.yaml. What the project declares: marketplaces, plugins, the worktree policy. You write it. See Project files.

agents.lock. What resolving agents.yaml produced: a commit per marketplace and a digest per plugin. Written by uze; deleting it loses nothing.

Bridge. The line a harness reads to find AGENTS.md, when it does not read that file natively. See Project context.

Managed region. A block inside a file you own, between <!-- uze:begin … --> and <!-- uze:end … --> markers. The only place uze writes.

Workspace

Workspace. The terminal UI that opens when you run uze workspace. See Workspace.

Terminal runtime. A local server that owns the terminals, so an agent keeps running after you close the UI.

Primary checkout. The project's own working tree, on the branch you have checked out. An agent works here until it is given a worktree.

Worktree. A Git worktree of its own for one agent, at .worktrees/<id> on branch agent/<id>. An agent gets one at launch when workspace.worktree is always, or when you move it with To worktree.

Slot. A worktree uze made and reuses for the next agent instead of creating a new one. Its making is recorded, and only a checkout uze made is ever reused or removed. See Running agents.

Subagent checkout. A slot an agent asked for with uze agent work split for one of its subagents. Its work comes back to the agent with uze agent work join. See Subagents.

Delivery (of work). Rebasing an agent's branch onto the target, running the project's checks, then merging or opening a pull request.

Extension. A surface built into the workspace: Spec, Architect and Code. See Extensions.

Conformance Lab. Tests that run each real harness binary in a sealed Docker world, with no internet and no tokens. See Development.