Glossary
A plain-English dictionary of the words you'll see across Operum. No jargon, no assumptions — just what each term means and why it matters.
Core Concepts
The seven ideas that everything else builds on.
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Agent | A specialized AI teammate that handles one kind of work — planning, coding, testing, and so on. Your Operum team is a group of these agents working together. |
| PM (Project Manager) | The lead agent and the one you talk to. It takes your requests, breaks them into work, and coordinates the other agents. |
| Pipeline | The step-by-step path every task follows from idea to finished — like an assembly line (design → build → test → review → done). |
| Issue | A single piece of work: a feature to build, a bug to fix, or a task to do. Everything starts as an issue. |
| Pull Request (PR) | A finished change waiting for approval before it becomes part of the live product — a "ready for sign-off" package. |
| Merge | Approving a Pull Request so its change goes live in the product. |
| Label | A tag on an issue that shows its current stage (e.g. "ready for dev", "in testing") and which agent owns it. |
More Terms
Other words that come up as you work with your team.
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Backlog | The list of work that's been captured but not started yet. |
| Turbo Mode | When on, agents proactively push work forward without waiting for you to prompt each step. |
| Auto-Merge | When on, approved-and-tested changes merge automatically — no manual sign-off needed. |
| QA (Quality Assurance) | The testing stage where a QA agent checks a change works before it can ship. |
| Branch / Worktree | A private workspace where an agent makes changes without affecting the live product or other agents. |
| Knowledge Base | The team's shared memory: project facts, decisions, and context that all agents can read. |
| Founder | You — the human owner who sets direction and approves key decisions. |
| Handoff | When one agent finishes its part and passes the work to the next agent in the pipeline. |
| Repository (repo) | The folder where your project's code lives, with a full history of every change ever made to it. Hosted on GitHub. When Operum asks you to “connect your repo,” this is what it means — and if you don't have one, Quick Start creates it for you. |
| Commit | One saved change to your code, with a short note explaining it. Commits are the individual steps in your project's history; a branch is a line of them. When an agent says it “pushed commit a8f31b3,” that string is the commit's ID. |
| Merge conflict | When two changes edit the same lines and git cannot decide which should win, so it stops and asks. It is a normal part of working in parallel, not a breakage or a lost file — nothing is deleted while a conflict is waiting. The agent working that branch resolves it and asks you only if the answer depends on what you want. |
| Draft | A pull request deliberately marked “not finished yet.” A draft looks much like a stalled PR, so the label matters: it means work is still in progress on purpose, and nobody is waiting on you to review it. |
| CI (Continuous Integration) | An automated checklist that runs against your code every time it changes — typically the tests, plus a build to prove it still compiles. It catches mistakes before they reach anyone else, which is why a pull request often shows a set of green ticks or a red cross. Projects with tests benefit most; a small static site may not need it at all. |
| API key / Token | A secret string that proves to another service that a request is really yours — like a password your software uses instead of you. Add these in Operum Desktop under Integrations, where they are stored in your system keychain and handed to agents as needed. Never paste one into a chat message or an issue. |
| Environment variable | A named setting passed to a program when it starts, kept outside the code so it can differ between machines — and so secrets never end up in your repository. Operum sets these for your agents from what you configure in Desktop under Integrations. Never paste a value into a chat message or an issue. |
| Hold | Work that has been deliberately paused, usually while a decision is made. A hold is not a failure and not a stuck agent — nothing is broken and nothing is lost; the work simply waits until the hold is lifted. If you see one and did not expect it, ask why rather than trying to restart the work. |
| Triage | What happens to a new issue before anyone starts building it: deciding what it actually is, how urgent it is, and which part of the pipeline it belongs in. The PM does this, which is why a new issue may sit briefly before moving. |
| Status labels (the ladder) | Every issue carries one status label, and that label decides which column it sits in on the Workflow Board. The two use different words for the same seven rungs, so: status:backlog is Backlog, status:needs-architecture is Architecture, status:ready-for-dev is Ready for Dev, status:in-progress is In Progress, status:needs-testing is QA Testing, status:needs-review is Ready to Merge, and status:done is Done. When an agent reports that it “advanced something to status:needs-testing,” the card has moved into QA Testing. |