Glossary

kitchn borrows its vocabulary from a restaurant kitchen. Here is what each word means in practice.

House: The organization kitchn works for: a company, a client or an open-source project. It owns the rules, allowed repositories, reviewers and credentials. Houses never share keys, context or history.
Station (role): One job with one owner, such as the cook who implements or the expediter who checks. Each station owes evidence and has a line it can't cross.
Brigade: All eight stations together.
Order (ticket): A task, usually a GitHub issue, moving from station to station.
The pass: The independent check before anything ships: the exact revision, the required checks and reviewers, and no open findings.
Pinned guidance: The house's written rules, imported as a verified snapshot and locked to a revision. A task keeps the rules it started with.
Orchestrator (backend): The tool that launches and supervises agents, such as Orca. kitchn sits on top of it.
Agent: The coding model doing the work at a station, such as Claude Code or Codex.
Evidence: What a station hands over: tests run, the exact revision, findings and what's still unknown. Missing evidence is never success.
Grant: Explicit permission for one kind of external action, such as posting or merging, scoped to a repository. Installing kitchn grants nothing.
Registry: The private directory, outside any checkout, where kitchn keeps house policies and pinned snapshots.
Binding: The registry record that ties a repository to its house and the workflows it opts into. It can add reviewers or checks, never remove them, and it never lives in the repository.
Workflow: An automated loop a repository can opt into, such as pickup or gate. Selecting one starts nothing.
Doctor: The command that reports what's still missing. Anything it can't observe is unknown, never fine.