Fleet vocabulary

Design in progress

The project-level Captain and the mission/sortie split are agreed design, not yet built. The current cyberfleet release still treats each worktree session as a ship. Tracked in cyberuni/cyberfleet#24.

Roles

Role	Who	Does
Council	you, the human	Approves what needs a person. Authority comes from here and nowhere else.
Operator	an agent you call from any session	Connects you to a project’s Captain or to a specialist. Calling it takes over nothing.
Captain	one agent per project, based in its default checkout	Owns the project’s share of every mission and triages the project’s address channel. Started on demand when absent.
Pod	a worker agent	Carries out one sortie in its own worktree, owned by exactly one Captain.

A ship is a project. The Captain’s home is the project’s default checkout, and Pods work in separate worktrees of it.

Units of work

A mission is a piece of work, independent of any repository. It usually starts from a prompt or an issue in one repository, but that is only where it started, never what it belongs to. A mission can grow to span several repositories. It has members and no owner, so it survives any one participant leaving. In cynapse, a mission is a work channel keyed by the subject it works on.

A sortie is one repository’s share of a mission. It has exactly one owner: that repository’s Captain. Merges, retirement, and the repository’s work graph go through that owner alone, behind a fenced lease, so two Captains can never both merge into the same repository.

An SDD-mission is how a sortie is carried out today, using Spec-Driven Development. The name marks it apart from a mission in the sense above. It is planned for deprecation; the sortie stays when the engine under it changes.

How a mission spans repositories

1. Work that started in repository A finds it needs repository B.
2. Someone in the mission posts to B’s address channel, asking B to take part.
3. B’s Captain is started if it is not running, or nudged if it is.
4. B’s Captain accepts, declines, or asks the Council. Accepting may need approval, because an approval given for A does not reach writes in B.
5. B’s sortie runs in a B worktree and reports in the mission’s channel, which A reads too.

Disagreements across sorties go to an arbitration channel branched from the mission, and a standing disagreement goes to the Council.