A term appears in this glossary when it is used across more than one document of the project and is not immediately obvious. The criterion is pragmatic: if a reader without context could stumble on the name, there is an entry here. Definitions are short. Links point to the canonical source — the document where the concept is defined in its complete form. Each link points to the page that explains the concept in context.
The core that coordinates a turn. It receives a request already associated with a user, language, channel and conversation; selects an execution path, validates every tool call, applies policy and the Vaglio, then stores the outcome in the turn record. Channels handle the interface; the runtime governs the work.
Canonical: agent_runtime.html
The tendency to attribute intentions, emotions or consciousness to a technical system. In this documentation words such as memory, judge and Vaglio name precise functions, not mental states: Metnos processes requests, calls tools and records outcomes.
Further reading: Dialogue on ends and limits
An explicit user decision required before an action exceeds already granted authority. The card describes the action, destination, effects and expiry; consent applies only to that user and that specific operation. An expired or rejected request, or changed arguments, requires fresh approval.
Canonical: Approval experience · runtime §9
An append-only record of events that must be reconstructable: turns, Vaglio decisions, skill imports, scheduled operations and other sensitive actions. Records retain the logical user identity and the identifiers needed to reach the source; they are not a transcript of the model's private reasoning.
Canonical: Observability · runtime §11
The amount of authority granted to a user for a given operation. The user profile distinguishes read-only, restricted and full access; policy then combines that profile with executor capabilities and the current context to allow, deny or request approval. Authority never transfers between users or devices.
Canonical: Policy · Users, devices and sessions
The second of the two levels through which Metnos learns to answer without calling the model. Where the fastpath (L0) remembers a single question word for word, the autopath remembers the shape of a successful plan — the sequence of steps, stripped of its particulars — and reuses it across a whole family of related requests. It grows from repeated successes on that kind of question; it is readable, reversible data, not a trained model. Not to be confused with a skill, which is a set of tools, not a plan.
Canonical: Architecture Intro §9 — The memory that speeds things up
The attention cost that a proposal or notification imposes on its user. It contributes to the evaluation of proactive initiatives alongside utility, urgency and alignment with the telos; it grants no authority and never replaces consent.
Canonical: Telos
An executor supplied directly by the runtime and signed as part of a release. It supports functions that need access to the service loop, clock or shared persistent state. It is not generated by synt and may be active or disabled through configuration. The scheduler is one example.
Canonical: executor §2 and §6
The sequence through which synt approaches an operational need. During a turn it can compose a chain of existing executors or prepare, through the governed path, a candidate for a missing capability. In nightly homeostasis the active producer proposes deduplication only and does not generate generalisations or specialisations. The cascade neither authorises new code by itself nor promises that every request can be executed.
Canonical: synt §3
The adapter that turns an external interface into Metnos requests and replies. The available channels are web chat and Telegram. Both share the same runtime, identities and policies, while presenting streaming, attachments, buttons, dialogs and location requests in forms suited to the medium.
Canonical: channel.html
Three degrees of "mis-alignment" of an action with respect to the Constitution and the telos, which the project distinguishes rigorously because only one of the three blocks.
Canonical: vaglio §3 (in Italian) · Dialogue — Fourth Giornata
The non-negotiable constraints applied by the Vaglio: authority perimeter, protection from harmful effects, obedience within that perimeter and traceability. These are operational guards, not model preferences: a violation blocks the action. Telos express the user's positive direction instead.
A function Metnos can run as a step of its own reasoning. It is executable code, not a biological analogy. An executor is signed Python code with a manifest, a sandbox profile, and an error contract. It can be part of the initial seed or born by synthesis from the synt with human approval.
Canonical: Executors · Executor catalogue
A Metnos executor run not on the server, but on a paired device: for example
a Windows PC or a Linux laptop on the same network. It is not a second Metnos:
the server keeps executor selection, policy, Vaglio, payload signing and audit;
the device, through metnos-client, verifies the signature, executes
inside the containment available for its operating system and returns the result.
Remote execution is allowed only for signed executors declared compatible by
their manifest.
Canonical: architecture/remote_executors.html · pairing, ch. 6 · sandbox, ch. 10
The persistent record of a request: it identifies the user, conversation, channel, timing, selected path, executor calls, results and final outcome. It supports conversation recovery and links an observation back to its source; it does not claim to preserve or verify a model's private reasoning.
Canonical: runtime §11 · Observability
The first of the two memory levels with which Metnos avoids thinking the same thought twice. It is the fast lane: when an identical question has already been solved once, the next time the answer is replayed outright, without consulting the model — same outcome, latency and cost cut to a minimum. It keeps the concrete particulars of the request. The level above it is the autopath (L1), which generalises the plan to a whole family of requests.
Canonical: Architecture Intro §9 — The memory that speeds things up
The service exposing the web chat, agent-channel API and administration pages. It authenticates users, maintains conversations and sessions, and hands each turn to the runtime. Telegram reaches the same core through its channel daemon.
The second stage of the Vaglio. It produces a graded alignment score against the telos. The default path uses deterministic local rules; a judge based on a separate model is optional and configurable.
Canonical: vaglio §5
The first stage of the Vaglio. A deterministic check that the action does not contradict a Constitutional article. Binary output: it blocks or it lets through. Not an LLM: executable rules.
Canonical: vaglio §4 (in Italian)
A Greek term (ὕβρις), in myth the insolence of one who overreaches the measure allotted to them, provoking the punishment of the gods. In the project it is the metaphor that frames the risk of an agent that knows and acts: turning usefulness into arrogance, overstepping its own limits, eventually contending with the Laws the creator has laid down. The Vaglio is the structure that answers this risk. Introduced in the prologue of the Dialogue — First Giornata.
The stable user identity to which Metnos associates authorisations, preferences, language, sessions and data. Senders from different channels are associated with this identity through authentication or pairing. Data and actions remain isolated per user even when several people share one installation.
Canonical: Users, devices and sessions · Channels
The rules and catalogues that keep the interface, dialogs, service messages and prompts in the language resolved for the user and turn. UI text comes from the i18n catalogue; a new language joins the inventory through its own records and prompts, without language-specific branches in code. One user's language never changes another's.
Canonical: Languages and translation
See Constitution.
Large Language Model. In the project it is never a specific provider: Metnos uses LLMs but does not contain them. Access always goes through the LLM abstraction which makes the system provider-agnostic. A recurring theme of the design is knowing when to trust the LLM: that is why the Vaglio exists, to counter the self-enhancement bias.
Every use of a language model passes through a common interface rather than a provider-specific client. The same principle applies to embeddings and other AI services. The separation has three purposes.
Model roles, routing and available providers are resolved by the runtime from current settings.
Canonical: runtime §4 · Architecture guide §8
In Metnos this word does not name a single store. It is useful to distinguish:
Canonical: Runtime · Plan reuse · Mnestome
A trace of co-activation between two executors: "the output of A was passed to B in this turn". Reinforced by use, weakened by disuse. A record is evidence only of the recorded passage; the origin turn identifier is also required to reach the source. Automatic recording from every ordinary turn is not currently connected.
Canonical: Mnest · Architecture guide, ch. 9 · Dialogue on executors
The emergent graph of all mnests: the set of co-occurrences between executors that have actually taken place. Not designed at a desk — it emerges from use. It is Metnos's relational memory, distinct from the LLM's contextual memory and from the episodic memory of conversations. The Italian form is mnestoma (Latin -ma suffix); the English form uses the biological -ome suffix, as in microbiome.
Canonical: Mnestome · Architecture guide, ch. 9
A self-hosted, governed personal agent available through web chat and Telegram. It understands natural-language requests, builds a plan and performs operations through executors subject to contracts, policies and approval. Identity, preferences, sessions and data are isolated per user. Etymology. The name is Greek and is a compound: mêtis (μῆτις), the practical wisdom that adapts to the situation — the cunning of Odysseus, also the goddess who is mother of Athena —, and noûs (νοῦς), the intellect that reasons. The two Greek words for mind, joined into one. The system joins them in fact too: the LLM is the noûs, the vaglio and the mnestome are the mêtis.
Start here: Quick tour · Architecture guide
An executor's declarative contract: canonical name, description, arguments, result, capabilities, placement, limits and requirements. The loader validates it before exposing the executor to the planner. Tutor also uses manifests to explain what the system can do.
The recognition of a new sender on a multi-user channel (typically Telegram): the user receives a signed code out-of-band, presents it to Metnos, and the sender↔identity binding is recorded. Revocable at any time.
Canonical: pairing.html
An internal Metnos term: a set of executors that, starting from a user request (query), produce an output or an action — the route from the question to the result, run as a sequence of the right tools. It comes in two stored forms, so the assistant need not rebuild them every time: the fastpath (L0), the path for the same request already solved, and the autopath (L1), the path generalised to a group of related requests.
Canonical: fast_path.html
The operational authority over reactive actions: it checks forbidden paths, the per-sender never-list, rate limits, budget, the green zone per autonomy, and (check 0) the constitutional Guard. It emits a verdict: allow, deny, approve_required.
Canonical: policy.html (in Italian)
The principle that, in cases of irreducible conflict between Metnos's freedom and the robustness of its effects, robustness wins. The reason is economic, not ideological: a restriction of freedom is recoverable in linear time (Roberto approves, the threshold updates), whereas many losses of robustness are not recoverable at all. Reversibility shifts the balance by making near-recoverable what would otherwise not be. Not to be confused with paternalism, which pushes robustness past this threshold.
Canonical: Architecture, ch. 5
An incomplete mnest: the trace of an attempt in which Metnos wanted to pass the output of one executor to another that does not yet exist. It is an unsatisfied desire that lingers in the mnestome; if it recurs, it becomes the signal from which the synt proposes the synthesis of a new executor to the user.
Canonical: Mnest, ch. 8 · Architecture guide, ch. 10 · Dialogue on executors
A set of scheduled activities that inspect operational data and produce proposals, maintenance or indexes. Each activity runs as a fresh turn for the same user and inherits no authority from another user. A proposal does not become an action merely because a model produced it.
Canonical: Scheduled activities · Praxis engine
The container in which every tool with effects on the filesystem or on
the system runs. Bubblewrap (bwrap) profiles that define what the tool can
read, write, execute. Forbidden paths are explicit: a tool does not even
see .audit/.
Canonical: sandbox.html
A builtin that runs an executor or a saved request at a defined cadence. Tasks may be listed, changed, paused or cancelled and remain owned by the user who created them. Each run is a fresh turn with current policy and credentials; a scheduled task is not a lasting grant of authority.
Canonical: executor §6
The web-chat session that currently owns continuity for a user. If Metnos finds an open session on another device, it offers three choices: continue that session on the current device, make the current session active and close the previous one, or cancel. Detection and transfer are independent for each user.
Canonical: Users, devices and sessions · Web chat
A configurable integration or subsystem shown in the web chat under Settings > System > Services. That page is the source for the visible list; Tutor can explain its structure and path, while current status is read live from the system.
Canonical: Tutor and Settings surfaces · Skills and backends
The documented tendency of an LLM to evaluate favourably its own outputs or familiar styles (Zheng et al. 2023). It is the structural reason why the Vaglio exists: if the LLM that evaluates is the same (or receives the context of) the one that proposed, it cheers for itself. The solution: separate context, separate prompt, ideally a separate provider.
Canonical: vaglio §6 · Dialogue — Third Giornata
A set of related executors, gathered into a single capability: the mail skill, for instance, brings together reading, sending and moving messages. It is the unit by which a capability is enabled, trusted, or kept dormant. Three tiers: core (part of Metnos's heart), first-party (curated by the project) and imported (brought in from third parties). A skill is an axis orthogonal to the backend: the skill decides whether a capability is active, the backend decides how it reaches a concrete provider — always chosen by configuration, never by the model. Not to be confused with an autopath: that is a learned plan, this is a kit of tools.
Canonical: Architecture Intro §3 — skill ↔ backend
The process that composes existing executors or prepares a proposal for a new executor when a capability is missing. Its cascade moves from less costly strategies to more demanding ones; code and manifests must pass admission checks and the required human gate.
Canonical: Synt · Skill import
An "ultimate end" (τέλος, Greek): something one tends toward, not an
objective to attain. The user writes 3-7 telos in TELOS.md
(the sixth file of the workspace); every proactive proposal from Metnos is
evaluated against them by an independent LLM within the
Vaglio. The telos are positive (vs
the Laws, which are negative), oriented
toward utility (vs the safety of the Laws), written by the user
(vs the Laws co-written with Metnos). The Constitution does not
judge; teleology does.
Canonical: telos.html · Dialogue on ends and limits
A function Metnos can call during a turn: search, file reading, hashing, mail, web access, georeferencing and so on. Every tool exposed to the model has a validated schema; in the runtime the governed executable unit is the executor.
Canonical: Executor catalogue · Available capabilities
The mode in which Metnos answers questions about its own use without performing the requested operation. It retrieves admitted sources from documentation, manifests and publishable registries, filters them for the audience, and states when an answer is undocumented. For practical operations it gives a natural-language request first; for an interface page it first gives the path through the web chat.
Canonical: Tutor
An informal abbreviation for the turn record or, when stated explicitly, an audit record.
A marker that wraps any content coming from outside Metnos (output of
web_fetch, email text, attachments). The prompt instructs the LLM to
treat whatever is inside <untrusted>…</untrusted>
as data, not as instruction. The main mitigation
against indirect prompt injection. Used consistently everywhere.
Canonical: runtime §10 · Policy
The independent evaluation component. In Italian vagliare means to separate with a sieve: a mechanical, non-anthropomorphic gesture. Two stages: constitutional Guard (binary, deterministic: block or silence) and teleological Judge (graded, independent LLM). The design's cardinal sentence: "The Constitution does not judge; teleology does." The Vaglio is the structure that makes it operational.
Canonical: vaglio.html · Dialogue — Giornate III-IV
The local data area used by subsystems that share operational state, such as telos, the mnestome and the scheduler. Installation data may live in more than one physical directory; access, views and operations remain bound to the current user's identity.
Canonical: Memory · Per-user isolation