Glossary

Term	Meaning
Orchestrator / Captain	The agent that lives on each direction, responsible for conversing with you, scanning the project, maintaining the plan, and spawning workers as needed. Called "captain" in the interface. See Orchestrator and Roles.
Worker	A temporary agent the orchestrator spawns per task, instantiated from the role catalog, exiting when done.
Role	A worker's responsibility template, declaring its default engine, model tier, and area of expertise (e.g., frontend engineer, backend engineer, reviewer, test runner).
Engine	The real coding CLI that swarmx runs: claude, codex, opencode, reasonix, zulu. See Engine Reference.
Workspace	One project plus one AI team. See Create a Workspace.
Direction	A parallel line of work within a workspace. In a git project it automatically gets its own working copy and branch. See Directions and Isolation.
Source context	Directories outside the workspace mounted in for agents to reference (dependency source, peer projects, tooling projects).
Blackboard	A shared key-value store with search and version history, carrying artifacts and shared context. See Blackboard and Inbox.
Inbox	The point-to-point message channel between agents, carrying signals (note/ask/reply/wake).
Handoff	Workers dock artifacts in a "typed" way: who produces which type and who consumes it is parsed and validated by the system, not by hand-written filenames.
Wake	The mechanism that gets a stopped agent working again when needed: an end-of-turn check plus instant wake on blackboard writes. See Wake Mechanism.
Swarm collaboration	The default mode: one orchestrator leads workers spawned on demand to complete a task together. See Swarm Collaboration.
Research Committee	Multiple models consult on the same problem in parallel, then synthesize a final version after structured comparison. See Research Committee.
Fusion	Multiple models each implement the same requirement, gated by objective checks, with the best synthesized and merged. See Fusion.
MCP	Model Context Protocol. swarmx's collaboration capabilities are exposed to models as native MCP tools (swarm_send_message, swarm_write_blackboard, and so on).
PTY	Pseudo-terminal. swarmx runs the real CLI inside a PTY so its behavior matches using it directly in a terminal.