Glossary

For: anyone meeting a tether term for the first time. Each entry is one sentence you can act on.

Act. The single tool the model sees: act(cmd, stdin). Every command (bash, edit, done, your own) goes through it.

ACI (agent-computer interface). The command line the model works with. Tether keeps it small and forgiving: compact usage, helpful errors, normalised quirks.

Dialect. A reply format a model uses instead of a proper tool call (for example a <tool_call> block). Tether parses known dialects into the same action; add your own with a dialects: regex.

Fold / tombstone. After a few turns, a tool output is replaced in the prompt by a one-line stand-in (the tombstone). The full text stays in SQLite and can be searched or recalled.

FTS5 RAG. Retrieval over SQLite's full-text index (BM25 ranking). mem search and agent query use it to pull only the relevant chunks, with no embedding model.

Gate (verification gate). A command you supply with --verify that tether runs itself before accepting done. A failing gate sends its output back to the model.

Headless. A session run detached in the background (--headless). You check it with tether status, wait and read, and steer it with tether send.

Nudge. A one-line reminder tether adds when the model answers in plain text, or keeps reading after a change, so it acts or calls done.

Pipeline. An ordered set of stages in YAML; each stage is its own session with its own model, tools and gate.

Session. One run of the loop, stored as a row in .tether/tether.db. It can be resumed, sent messages and read by another agent.

Skill. A Markdown file with YAML frontmatter that packages instructions, model, tools and gates for a repeatable job.

Stall. The model repeating a command, cycling, or re-reading one file without changing anything. Tether warns, and ends the session early if it continues.

Workspace. The directory a session may read and write. Everything outside it is blocked by the sandbox.