Glossary
Layover borrows its words from an airport, and uses them consistently: in layover.toml, the
HTTP API, the dashboard and these pages. This is each of them in a sentence, with where to read
more.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Agent | One configured agent: a name, a runner, a prompt, and what it is for. An airport, in the metaphor. Configuration |
| Flight | A piece of work in transit to an agent: what one agent, a schedule or a person sends, and what starts the agent it is sent to. Tools |
| Itinerary, chain | Everything one trigger caused: its flights and runs, and the budget they share. The API says itinerary; the dashboard says chain. Chains |
| Hops | How many more flights a chain may take: its depth. Each flight spends one, and a fan-out's branches inherit the count rather than splitting it. Pipelines |
| Fuel | A chain's budget in dollars: its breadth. Every run in the chain draws on it. Cost |
| Run cap | max_runs: how many runs a chain may have, for when a runner does not report what it cost. |
| Reserve | The whole factory's budget over a rolling window, checked before every run. Cost |
| Tower | The supervisor, layover serve: it starts runs, holds every counter, and serves the MCP endpoint and the dashboard. |
| Run | One supervised execution of an agent CLI. A fresh process that remembers nothing it was not given. |
| Runner | How a CLI is started: a CLI and a permission set, shared by every agent with those permissions. A preset (cli = "copilot") supplies what an unattended run needs. Runners |
| Route, route map | A directed edge saying one agent may send work to another; the route map is all of them. No route, no flight. Routes |
| Join, rendezvous | A route that parks arriving work until every sender (or any) has delivered, then wakes the agent once with all of it. The parked work waits behind a barrier. Routes |
| Spawn | A route mode that opens a new chain per flight, with its own Hops and Fuel, instead of continuing the sender's. Routes |
| Pipeline | How work gets in: an entry agent, a trigger — a person or a clock — and the flags it accepts. Pipelines |
| Workflow | A pipeline seen whole: its trigger, the agents its chains reach and the routes they may use. The dashboard shows one at a time, and each can be switched off. |
| Flag | A switch chosen when a workflow is triggered, which prompts test to include or leave out text. It travels with the chain. Prompts |
| Layover | Work an agent sets down to be picked up later by a pipeline that resumes it — a pull request waiting for comments, say. Tools |
| Hangar | An agent's private state directory: its notes (memory.md), and each run's prompt, transcript and MCP configuration. |
| Logbook | The factory's shared memory, one Markdown file every agent can add to. |
| Learning | Something an agent worked out that later runs of it are told. It applies at once and lapses unless rediscovered. Learnings |
| Help request | An agent saying something is in its way. A fatal one stops its run and waits for a person to reply from the dashboard. Help |
| Recovery | Starting a new run on the same flight after a run was interrupted, or ended by the model service, where its agent's recovery allows. Recovery |
| Ground Stop | The kill switch: running agents are ended and nothing new starts until it is released; parked work is kept. A file on disk, so it survives a crash. Dashboard |
| Drain | Letting what is running finish while nothing new starts — how layover stop and an update end a Tower. Stopping |