Glossary
Terms are defined here once and used consistently everywhere else. Where a word is used differently elsewhere in the industry, that is noted.
Agent
A program that pursues a goal by calling tools, under an identity, inside a capability grant. In Cogitave usage an agent is a process, not a chat session - it has a lifecycle, a budget, and an audit trail.
Agent kernel
The layer that runs agents the way an operating system runs processes: isolation, scheduling, signals, budgets, memory, durability, and an event stream. Namzu is Cogitave's agent kernel. A kernel is deliberately not an application framework - it ships no interface and picks no vendor.
Capability
A named authority an agent may exercise - a tool it may call, a resource it may read. Capabilities are an allow-list: an agent can do exactly what it declares and nothing more. See Agent identity and capabilities.
Capability grant
The explicit, least-privilege set of capabilities an agent runs under. Default deny. Widening a grant is a human decision, never a workaround.
Evidence
A write-once record of an action, produced to the OpenTelemetry specification. Assume non-repudiation: evidence is what a reviewer or auditor reads, not a log you tidy up afterwards.
Fair Source / FSL-1.1-MIT
Namzu's licence. The source is readable and usable now, and every published version converts to MIT two years after its release.
Learning path
An ordered programme of modules in training. Completing one earns a trophy.
MCP - Model Context Protocol
The protocol Cogitave exposes capabilities over. Tools are actions with typed input and output; resources are addressable read-only surfaces. The point of being MCP-native is that a human calling an API and an agent calling a tool reach the same surface, not two implementations of it.
Module
A short, self-contained unit of training - a handful of units, an exercise, and a knowledge check. Completing one earns a badge. A module stands on its own even when it belongs to a learning path.
Provider / provider driver
A model vendor adapter, published as its own package (@namzu/openai, @namzu/ollama, and others). The kernel treats every driver identically, so switching vendors is a change at registration. See Choose a provider.
Sandbox
The enforcement layer for a capability grant. Namzu ships process-level isolation using platform primitives (bubblewrap, Seatbelt) and container-level isolation with a JWT-authenticated egress proxy. Declared in the kernel, enforced by the sandbox.
Sovereign unikernel
A kernel that owns the hardware it runs on rather than sitting as a process inside another operating system - so its isolation, memory, and audit guarantees are enforced by a layer you control. Yuva is Cogitave's.
Tool
A capability with typed input and output that an agent may invoke. Typed on both sides: the kernel validates input before a handler runs, so a handler only ever sees well-formed arguments.
Unit
The smallest piece of training - one page, a few minutes. Some units are prose, some are exercises, and some are knowledge checks.