Crewship concepts and glossary
Crewship separates the place where work lives from the people and automations that perform it. This glossary is the shortest route from a noun in the dashboard or CLI to the reference page that defines it.Work objects
Named roles and services
How the pieces fit
An agent receives a task in a crew. The crew supplies the runtime and shared memory; the workspace supplies identity and global resources. A routine or issue can start the run, Keeper and Harbormaster can govern sensitive steps, Quartermaster supplies approved credentials, Paymaster records cost, and the Journal records what happened.The boundaries that matter in practice
Workspace, crew, and project
Use a workspace for tenant-wide ownership: members, credentials, global skills, and policy. Use a crew for an execution boundary: its agents share a container, network posture, and crew memory. Use a project when the question is delivery status across related issues. A project can contain work assigned to several crews; it does not grant those crews access to each other’s containers or memory.Agent, lead, and mission
An agent is the worker that receives a prompt and uses tools. A lead is still an agent, but its role permits coordination and delegation; it is not automatically a manager with unrestricted authority. A mission is the durable execution record around multi-step work. If work pauses at a waitpoint, the mission remains inspectable; it does not require an agent process to stay alive indefinitely.Routine, issue, and skill
An issue describes work and its lifecycle. A routine describes repeatable execution and its triggers. Either can lead to an agent run, but they answer different questions: “what needs doing?” versus “how and when should it run?” A skill supplies reusable instructions to an eligible agent; it is not a routine trigger and it does not itself execute.The named services in one run
The named roles are easier to remember as a sequence:- Lookout checks the execution boundary and tool-shaped inputs in process.
- Quartermaster resolves which credential binding can be delivered to the run.
- Keeper evaluates whether that access is allowed, denied, or needs escalation.
- Harbormaster holds the human decision when policy requires one.
- Paymaster records model usage and cost as the run proceeds.
- Cartographer records checkpoints and recoverable mission structure.