Daemon#
The detached host process that routes sessions, runs jobs, serves RPC, emits cadence ticks, and coordinates durable state.
Foreground cortex#
The live conversation loop. It responds to a channel message, reasons with the session's runtime, uses tools, and returns the visible result.
Session#
One durable actor with its own ordered work stream. A foreground session is tied to a conversation and workspace; jobs and subconscious partitions also run in isolated session contexts.
Channel#
A way into DuoDuo: the terminal (stdio), Feishu/Lark, an ACP-enabled editor, Ambient for a room you speak in, or Tether for other assistants.
Tether#
The channel through which personal assistants you already use (the Grok app, Dots in ChatGPT, Meta's Muse) and agents such as Claude Code or Codex connect to DuoDuo over MCP and answer from its context. Each connection is approved with the owner's passkey and becomes a named address that DuoDuo's sessions can mail.
Ambient#
The channel for a room. It listens continuously, records everything said, and acts only on what was said to DuoDuo. Its hearing is done by the cerebellum.
Cerebellum#
Ambient's backend, published as a reference implementation. Each of its five legs (ears, diarizer, voiceprints, judge, mouth) is a contract that can run locally or in the cloud; the balanced split keeps the listening legs local.
DuoDuo Pocket#
Ambient on your iPhone. The DuoDuo app is the Ambient channel's app: one conversation with your DuoDuo, plus ambient mode and accessories. It is in TestFlight beta.
Passport#
The first Pocket accessory: a card-sized device with a screen and three buttons that reaches DuoDuo through the paired phone over Bluetooth.
Harness#
The loop around a model that turns reasoning into work. Claude, Codex, Grok, and Pi are harnesses; DuoDuo is the environment they live in.
Job#
Background work with its own session. A job can run once, repeat on a cadence, self-pace, or remain dormant until notified.
Spine#
The event bus that connects channels, cadence, and sessions. Its append-only WAL is the source of truth for recovery and audit; a best-effort live feed speeds up running components without carrying correctness.
Spine event#
A canonical, timestamped record of something that arrived or happened. Events are appended to the Spine WAL before execution and form the source-of-truth timeline.
Kernel#
The Git-tracked filesystem home for prompts, configuration, the intuition layer and its dossiers (under memory/), plus subconscious partitions and their playlist.
Cadence#
The daemon heartbeat that scans due jobs, runs the mechanical checks on the intuition layer, and gives the next eligible subconscious partition a turn.
Subconscious#
The background cognitive loop. It wakes independently of conversation traffic to read event evidence, distill text gradients, tend the intuition layer, and commit what changed to the kernel's Git history.
Partition#
One bounded subconscious responsibility defined by its own directory, prompt, schedule, cooldown, and directed inbox.
Text gradient#
How DuoDuo learns: it trains the words on its intuition board instead of a model's weights. A text gradient names one line of the board, cites the events it tested that line against, and says which way the line should move. Without the evidence it cites, it does not exist. gradient-distiller writes text gradients; intuition-weaver weaves them into the intuition layer. See Mental Model.
Intuition layer#
A compact board, one line per pointer, loaded into every new foreground session. intuition-weaver, its only writer, weaves it from text gradients. It points to deeper dossiers, lessons and grooves instead of copying the whole historical archive into every prompt. Lines are added, rewritten, reordered, and retired as the evidence moves. On disk it is memory/CLAUDE.md in the kernel.
Lesson#
A verified correction arc, distilled: what went wrong, what fixed it, and the trigger that should surface it. Lessons are promoted into the kernel only with supporting evidence.
Groove#
A procedure that has converged through repeated successful use and is stable enough to reuse without re-deriving it each time.
Descriptor#
A Markdown file with frontmatter that configures a channel kind or one channel instance and can carry an additional prompt body.
Runtime#
Claude, Codex, Grok or Pi: the harness a session, job or partition uses to do the work.
Widget#
A durable browser page for presenting a result or collecting structured input when chat is not enough.