# Glossary — Interpretable Context Methodology Corpus

> Unified, deduplicated vocabulary across the talk and the paper. Alphabetical.

- **11Labs / ElevenLabs** — commercial AI speech synthesis and voice cloning provider; used in the talk's voice-driven demo. See [[entity-11labs]].
- **AutoGen** — Microsoft's open-source multi-agent conversation framework; framework foil cited only in the paper. See [[entity-autogen]].
- **CLAUDE.md** — the Layer 0 file at workspace root encoding global agent identity (~800 tokens). See [[concept-five-layer-hierarchy]].
- **Claude** — Anthropic's family of LLMs; the orchestrator throughout the corpus. See [[entity-claude]].
- **Claude Code** — Anthropic's developer agent runtime using Opus 4.6 as orchestrator and Sonnet 4.6 as subagent workers; the sole runtime tested by the paper. See [[entity-claude-code]].
- **Context engineering** — Karpathy's (2025) framing: system behaviour depends on what context is delivered, in what structure, at what moment. See [[concept-context-scoping]].
- **Context scoping** — ICM's performance mechanism: the model is unchanged; the *available information* per stage is what changes. See [[concept-context-scoping]].
- **CONTEXT.md** — file used at Layer 1 (workspace routing) and Layer 2 (stage contract). See [[concept-five-layer-hierarchy]].
- **Dialogue tree** — the latent decision structure inside a successful human–AI conversation (Goal → Constraints → Assumptions → Sub-goals → Execution). See [[concept-dialogue-structure]].
- **Edit-source principle** — fix the cause (source files) not the symptom (output). See [[concept-edit-source-principle]] and [[quote-edit-source]].
- **Glass-box AI** — system interpretable by construction because every artifact is a plain text file. Colloquial usage; strict regulatory usage requires more. See [[concept-observability-side-effect]] and [[quote-glass-box]].
- **ICM (Interpretable / Interpretible Context Methodology)** — folder + markdown substrate for AI agent context, replacing framework-level orchestration. Spelled "Interpretible" in the talk, "Interpretable" in the paper. See [[concept-icm-d1]] and [[concept-icm-d2]].
- **Inherent interpretability (Rudin)** — preference for systems interpretable by construction over post-hoc explanations of opaque ones. Cited as ICM's interpretability lineage.
- **L0 / L1 / L2 / L3 / L4** — the five context layers: global identity / workspace routing / stage contract / stable references / per-run working artifacts. See [[concept-five-layer-hierarchy]].
- **LangChain** — popular open-source LLM framework; canonical framework foil. See [[entity-langchain]].
- **Level 1 / Level 2 / Level 3 (of AI use)** — talk's maturity model: copy-paste / structured prompts / integrated workflow. See [[concept-three-levels-ai]].
- **LLM Wiki** — Karpathy's markdown-based personal knowledge approach, cited as ICM-adjacent. See [[entity-andrej-karpathy-d1]].
- **Lost in the middle (Liu et al.)** — finding that LLMs degrade on information buried in long contexts; supports ICM's scoping argument. See [[prereq-llm-context-windows]].
- **Mixed-initiative (Amershi et al.)** — design guidelines for human–AI interaction; ICM's review gates map onto efficient correction and efficient dismissal.
- **Multi-pass compilation** — compiler analogy for ICM stages as content-compilation passes. See [[concept-icm-as-compilation]].
- **Observability** — readable intermediate state. ICM provides this by construction; observability ≠ traceability. See [[concept-observability-side-effect]] and [[question-semantic-debugging]].
- **Output (folder)** — Layer 4 per-run working artifacts inside a stage. See [[concept-five-layer-hierarchy]].
- **Pipe-and-filter** — software architecture pattern (Shaw & Garlan); ICM is its Unix-pipes-for-LLMs descendant. See [[prereq-unix-pipelines]].
- **Portability** — the workspace is a folder; copy, zip, commit, or sync to deploy. See [[concept-portability]].
- **References (folder)** — Layer 3 stable rules and constraints inside a stage. See [[concept-five-layer-hierarchy]] and [[action-separate-l3-l4]].
- **Remotion** — React-based framework for programmatic video; used in the paper's script-to-animation pipeline. See [[entity-remotion]].
- **Review gate** — the editable pause between two stages where a human inspects and edits the output before the next stage reads it. See [[action-review-gates]].
- **Semantic Kernel** — Microsoft's open-source orchestration framework using "skills" / "planners" / "connectors"; framework foil. See [[entity-semantic-kernel]].
- **Single orchestrator** — the precise paper framing replacing the talk's looser "single agent": one orchestrator (Opus 4.6) with folder-driven subagent (Sonnet 4.6) delegation. See [[synthesis-single-agent-clarified]].
- **Skill** — talk's term for a single markdown file encoding Goal, Constraints, Assumptions, Sub-goals. In paper vocabulary this is a stage contract. See [[framework-skill-creation]] and [[synthesis-skill-equals-stage-contract]].
- **Stage** — a numbered folder representing one pipeline step in an ICM workspace. See [[action-numbered-stage-folders]].
- **Stage contract** — paper's term for a stage's Layer 2 `CONTEXT.md`; declares inputs, processing, outputs. See [[concept-stage-contracts]].
- **Traceability** — automatic mapping of output spans back to causing source snippets. ICM does not yet provide this. See [[question-semantic-debugging]].
- **Unix philosophy** — McIlroy's "do one thing well" + plain text as universal interface; ICM's architectural ancestor. See [[prereq-unix-pipelines]].
- **U-shape (intervention pattern)** — empirical claim that humans edit heavily at the first and last stages and lightly in the middle. See [[claim-ushaped-intervention]].
- **Voice-driven AI collaboration** — talk's forward-looking vision of voice + LLM + local file-system loop during live meetings. Explicitly out of paper's scope. See [[concept-voice-collaboration]] and [[tension-voice-future-vs-paper-non-support]].
- **Workspace** — an ICM project: a folder containing the canonical layout (`CLAUDE.md`, `CONTEXT.md`, `stages/`, etc.). See [[framework-icm-architecture]].
- **Workspace-builder** — the self-hosting meta-workspace whose output is a new workspace. See [[framework-workspace-builder]].