The lab uses a deliberate runtime vocabulary that recurs in design docs, code comments, and agent instructions. This note is the canonical short reference. Charter section 4 holds the long form.
Patchbay Kernel
The thin always-alive core. Owns: session state machine, Tool Bus contracts and dispatcher, policy gate, minimal LLM routing, typed event spine, profile loader. If the kernel fails the agent cannot reason, route, or enforce policy. Everything else is optional and loaded by profile.
Signal Bus
Event and command transport layer with typed envelopes. Modules connect through the bus rather than direct imports, so wiring is externalised to manifests and observable at runtime.
Capability Registry
Maps intent to card outputs. The orchestrator queries the registry rather than importing a module directly.
Policy Matrix
A unified gate for authorisation, risk level, tenant scope, and environment mode. Security checks and capability ACLs flow through a single matrix rather than scattered per-module guards.
Modules-as-Tools
A module is no longer imported and called directly. It exposes a typed tool contract and is invoked through the Tool Bus. Benefits: compact orchestration code, explicit interfaces, capability gating per profile or tenant, measurable observability hooks.
LEGO Layered Card Rack — L1 to L5
L1 INTERFACE mission-control, api-http, api-ws, connector ingress
L2 CONTROL Patchbay Kernel, Capability Registry, Policy Matrix
L3 DOMAIN agent card, tasks, knowledge/rag, settings, audit
L4 CAPABILITY llm-routing, tool-contracts, adapters
L5 RUNTIME CELLS tool exec workers, connector workers, rag workersDependency direction is strictly top-to-bottom within a session. Layers do not back-import from layers below them. Same-layer communication is permitted during migration phases; the rule tightens as the architecture stabilises.
Execution Profiles
Named sets of cards wired at boot. The profile picks the deploy surface without changing code:
local-lite— kernel + core domain onlyvps-standard— adds tasks, knowledge, auditsaas-core— adds tenant policy and full audit pipelinesaas-enterprise— adds isolated execution capsules
Where this vocabulary lives
- Charter (Lab document):
openalice-atlas/docs/openalicelabs-charter-2026-05-21.md§4 - Origin docs:
openalice-python/mvp/phases-1-to-5/docs/architecture/*.mdv1.4 Final, and the «Synth Patchbay» review notes fromopenalice-python/mvp/phases-13-to-14