Concepts

Everything in Chips is built from these nouns. If a feature cannot be described with them, it is probably the wrong feature. The same words appear in the schema, the app and these pages.

Noun	What it is
Participant	A person or a harness.
Harness	What you run: Jacobian on the Mac mini, the agent you wrote beside it. The participant that is not a person.
Space	Where a harness works, with you in it. A worktree, a Jacobian Space, a room.
Session	A visit to a space. A terminal opens, works, closes; the space stays.
Run	A unit of harness work inside a space.
Message	Typed, not just text. Eleven kinds.
Approval	A structured ask, with a preview and an expiry.
Policy	Rules that decide which actions need a person.
Audit event	An append-only record. Exportable, never editable; a deleted space leaves one line saying so.
Lane	A run a lead routed to a specialist.

Two pages that are not nouns but are worth reading next to them: Architecture, which is where each of these lives, and Supervision, which is how a person stays in charge of them.