Glossary
Glossary
A quick map of Origin terms: memory, handoff, page, space, daemon, MCP, local index, provenance, and eval language.
At a glance
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Use this glossary when a docs page mentions an Origin term and you need the short version before continuing.
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The important distinction: readable artifacts are for humans, the local daemon and index are for retrieval, and MCP is how agents reach the same store.
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Workflow terms
Memory: one durable idea from AI work, such as a decision, lesson, gotcha, preference, fact, or correction.
Capture: the act of storing one durable idea. Handoff: the end-of-session record that tells the next agent what changed, what remains open, and where to continue.
- Brief: session-start context loaded from recent status, handoffs, and topic-relevant memory.
- Recall: targeted search for a specific past fact or thread.
- Distill: synthesize related memories into source-backed pages.
- Review: inspect uncertain captures, revisions, contradictions, or rejected items before trusting them.
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Storage terms
Distilled page: a readable Markdown page composed from related memories, with source memory IDs preserved for provenance.
Markdown projection: the human-readable artifact layer under ~/.origin. Local index: the daemon-owned libSQL store that powers embeddings, FTS, graph context, pages, metadata, and retrieval.
- Source-backed: a page or claim traces back to memory IDs instead of appearing as an unsourced summary.
- Local git history: commits under ~/.origin/.git that make writes inspectable over time.
- Page source: a memory that contributed to a distilled page.
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Runtime terms
Daemon: origin-server, the local process on 127.0.0.1:7878 that owns storage, search, pages, graph context, distill cycles, and the HTTP API.
MCP connector: origin-mcp, the process MCP clients launch so agents can call Origin tools. CLI: the origin command-line tool for setup, status, doctor, recall, search, store, spaces, models, keys, and MCP config.
- Claude Code plugin: the slash-command workflow layer around the same daemon and MCP connector.
- MCP-only setup: local runtime plus MCP tools, without Claude Code slash skills.
- Local memory mode: core capture, search, recall, and artifacts without a local model download or API key.
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Trust terms
Confirmed memory: a memory accepted as trustworthy enough to carry forward. Pending memory: a capture that still needs review or confidence improvement.
Supersession: a newer memory replaces an older fact while preserving the history of why the old fact existed.
- Revision: a proposed update to an existing memory or page.
- Contradiction: two memories conflict and need human or daemon-side resolution.
- Quality-gate rejection: a capture attempt discarded before storage because it was duplicate, low-signal, or otherwise not useful memory.
- Forget: delete a memory by ID when it should not remain in the local record.
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Separation terms
Space: a named memory bucket such as work, personal, client-X, or a project name. Spaces reduce context bleed while keeping one daemon and one install.
Active space: the bucket chosen by inline arguments, ORIGIN_SPACE, spaces.toml, current repo, topic, or default resolver state.
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Evaluation terms
Recall@5 measures whether relevant context appears in the top five retrieved results. MRR rewards putting the first relevant result higher. NDCG@10 rewards strong ranking across the top ten.
Origin's public numbers are retrieval-only evals, not end-to-end answer-quality guarantees. They show whether the memory layer surfaces relevant context, not whether a downstream model always reasons correctly.
Next
Architecture
How Origin is put together: one local daemon, thin clients, shared wire types, local artifacts, and retrieval owned by origin-core.
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