Glossary

The vocabulary used throughout this documentation, in alphabetical order.

Agent — An AI coding assistant that Chronos drives on your behalf to do work in a session. Your organization decides which agents are available.

Approval — A required sign-off before something happens — a sensitive command, a capability install, or a merge.

Audit trail — The complete, tamper-proof record of everything done in Chronos: every instruction, change, approval and merge.

Base branch — The branch your sessions start from and are compared against (for example main).

Capability — An approved skill or tool your organization makes available to agents, delivered as a governed pack. See Capabilities.

Checks — Your verification steps (tests, linting, quality gates), defined as named scripts in workspace settings. A green result is required to merge.

Connected tool / data source — An approved external system an agent can use (such as a knowledge base), with your credentials kept protected — the agent never sees them.

Governance — Your organization’s central control over which agents, tools, context and permissions apply.

Kairos — Chronos’s built-in pack of method skills: proven working methods (like brainstorming an approach before coding) that agents retrieve on demand instead of carrying them in every prompt. Governed like any other capability.

Plan mode — A mode where the agent proposes an approach without making changes. See Prompting and plan mode.

Pull request — The request to merge a session’s work, following your normal review process.

Pulse — Chronos’s built-in guardrail pack (id pulse): engineering standards applied to every session’s context. It is on by default and not overridable per session.

Secure terminal — A terminal that runs inside a session’s isolated environment and records every command.

Sequence — The list of instructions you send to a session, worked in order.

Session — One unit of work, isolated on its own branch — it never touches your main branch. See Sessions.

Tempo — Chronos’s built-in optimizer pack (id tempo): it runs at the adapter layer to improve how the agent works. Where your organization allows it, you can toggle it per session — chronos session set-capability <id> tempo --off.

Workspace — A repository you’ve connected to Chronos, with its own settings.