Glossary

Use this page when a term in a guide is unfamiliar.

Agents#

Coding agent — your agent working in the business repository. It authors product and application changes, opens pull requests, and uses the CLI or MCP for platform operations.

Farther Shore Agent — the platform-run operating agent for a live business. The currently enableable role is the Operator. It observes bounded business metrics, composes research and analysis, posts to the Bulletin, and may take only explicitly enabled marketing or customer-experience actions.

Operator — the single Farther Shore Agent role available today. It is off by default and is enabled per business through the dashboard, CLI, or MCP.

Bulletin — the business feed where the Operator publishes insights, warnings, and change requests for a human or coding agent to review.

Agent run — one scheduled Operator execution. A run records its status, composed launches, usage, trace summary, and action receipts.

Product definition#

Business — the software product Farther Shore manages. Its code-managed definition lives in the repository's business/ folder.

Business program — all TypeScript modules under business/. The compiler loads the folder and requires exactly one exported, declared fs.business() result. The managed starter convention is business/business.ts, but filenames are not part of the contract and declarations may be split across modules.

Manifest — the deterministic output of building the business program. Core accepts this output; it does not run arbitrary repository code.

Surface — a way customers use the product, such as a hosted frontend or an API.

Route — a path-first HTTP operation declaration. Its branded ref is the unit a plan grants.

Access group — a reusable bundle of route or group refs created with fs.group().

Plans and usage#

Plan — a versioned offer with a declared kind (free, flat, usage, prepaid, hybrid, trial, custom) and up to five economic controls: price, usagePricing, funding, lifecycle, spendPolicy. Access grants and structural limits sit beside them.

Plan kind — the declared classification of a plan (fs.plan.kind.*). The compiler validates the controls against the kind; nothing is inferred from shape.

Grant — access a plan gives to a stable route identity.

Measure — one observed quantity (fs.measure("input_tokens")); the key a backend sends under values.

Dimension — a selector axis for measurements (fs.dimension("model")); the key a backend sends under dims.

Meter — a measurement declaration: a set of measures reported together plus the dimensions they may be reported under. Never a price.

Pricing catalog — an immutable, versioned family of exact rates for one meter (fs.pricing()), with structured items (provider, model, modality?), where conditions, modifiers, tiers, and bounded backend quotes.

Rating context — the resolved, immutable input to rating: catalog version, selector match sets, agreement terms, tier semantics, exact rational rates.

RatedCharge — the exact nanodollar value of one measurement under its rating context.

Funding bucket — value that pays rated charges before anything is owed: fs.included, fs.prepaid, fs.promo, fs.referral.

Allowance — an included bucket, denominated in rated value and reissued each period.

Disclosure — spendPolicy.disclosure: transparent surfaces show rates and totals; opaque surfaces show only allowance remaining.

Exhaustion — spendPolicy.onExhaustion: fs.exhaustion.block denies at zero; fs.exhaustion.overage(binding) continues as amount due.

Economic agreement — a confirm-gated binding of one subscription to a pricing family with negotiated terms; created and amended through the CLI.

Commercial release — the immutable, content-addressed per-business bundle that binds structure and money; activated per business by appending to a release log.

Admission descriptor — the compiled per-route linear bound the gateway evaluates to reserve a request's economic maximum before forwarding it.

Bill preview — the subscriber money surface, computed by the invoicing engine over the ledger; honors disclosure.

Resource — a countable object such as projects or team members.

Limit — a structural plan rule that caps request rate, resources, concurrency, or per-request capacity. Money bounds come from funding and spend policy, not from limits.

Overage — usage rated as amount due after an allowance is exhausted, on a plan with fs.exhaustion.overage.

Settlement rail — Stripe: collects amount due and recurring fees, pays refunds, and remits tax. It never rates usage or owns a balance.

Runtime and operations#

Core — the control plane and source of truth for businesses, subscriptions, rating, funding, the monetary ledger, and operational state.

Gateway — the edge service that authenticates requests and enforces route grants and limits before forwarding them.

Backend — your upstream service registered with a business. It can use a direct public origin or a managed tunnel.

Runtime token — an FS_RUNTIME_TOKEN used by @farthershore/backend to obtain runtime configuration and authenticate usage reports. A token can cover a business, environment, or backend and can further restrict operations, meters, and routes.

User CLI session — the credential created by farthershore login. It acts as the approving user and reloads current organization membership and role on every request.

MakerToken — a separately issued, organization-scoped automation credential with fixed exact permissions and optional selected-business scope. It is used when automation must be narrower than a user CLI session.

Preview environment — a non-production environment bound to a branch for testing product changes.

Apply — Core validating and applying a built manifest to an environment.

Release — the production GitHub Release that publishes deferred economic contract changes (as a new commercial release) and triggers the production hosted-frontend build.

Business rollback — a new forward publish workflow that re-applies the captured manifest snapshot from an earlier workflow. It does not rewrite Git history.

Contract operation — a change represented in the business program, such as a plan, route, meter, or limit. Make it in code and push it.

Operate action — runtime state with no business-program representation, such as rotating a token or rolling back a frontend. Use the CLI, MCP, or dashboard.