Concepts & glossary
These are the terms Shepherd uses across the UI and this documentation. The same
definitions drive the inline term tooltips in the app (registry:
ui/src/lib/glossary.ts).
Shepherd concepts
Section titled “Shepherd concepts”In Shepherd, a tracking issue whose sub-issues are wired by dependency edges — Shepherd spawns a session per ready child, collects their PRs on an integration branch, and lands everything as one final PR. (From Agile, where an epic is a large body of work split into smaller stories.)
Critic
Section titled “Critic”Shepherd’s isolated, read-only review agent that inspects a PR’s diff once CI is green and posts a verdict.
Merge train
Section titled “Merge train”Shepherd’s queue that carries a ready PR through rebase and merge automatically, landing it once CI stays green.
REWORK
Section titled “REWORK”A session sent back to revise its work after the plan gate or PR critic requested changes, instead of approving it.
Inferred
Section titled “Inferred”Derived by the recap model from the code — not verified against the real diff. Treat it as a hint, not ground truth.
Lightweight repo
Section titled “Lightweight repo”A repo Shepherd drives with local git only — no Forge, no GitHub, no PRs, no remote. When a task finishes, the agent’s branch is squash-merged into the base branch locally; the operator pushes to a remote when they choose.
Industry terms
Section titled “Industry terms”Pull request — a proposed set of code changes submitted for review and merging into a branch. (Wikipedia)
Continuous integration — automatically building and testing every change so problems surface early. (Wikipedia)