Canonical Terms

A working glossary. The point is to reduce metaphor sprawl by acknowledging that different words mean different things even when they gesture at the same region.

Object-level

• IdeaFlow — the company and the product family. Public-facing name.
• Mew / Mew Lite / Mew Edge — internal/experimental product names for the graph product.
• Thoughtstream — the voice-first capture product (develop.ideaflow.app; stage-api.ideaflow.app).
• Entanglement — earlier-generation prototype (2023-2024) that informed the graph UX.
• Gopher backbone / GraphMirror — speculative names for the graph-editor primitive, framed as a cross-app substrate.

Data-model terms

• Node — the atom. Can be text, a tag, a person, a place, a page.
• Relation / edge — a typed connection between nodes.
• Graph — the union.
• Zone / active zone — a node with sublist-inheritance semantics; stands for "context you've focused on right now."
• Gestalt — a cluster of nodes that coheres into a single recognizable pattern. Predates Mew; see http://gestaltexplanation.jacobcole.net/.
• Spark (of motivation) — the atomic unit of intent. See framings/sparks-of-motivation.
• God data structure — Jacob's maximalist framing for the graph: one structure capable of representing everything in the world, including Google Maps paths, category theory, etc.

Cognition terms

• Capture — getting a thought out of your head and into the system.
• Recall — getting a thought back into working memory when you need it.
• O(1) capture and recall — Cody's shorthand for the product-level requirement: both operations should feel costless.
• Cluster — finding the attractor under a bunch of related sparks.
• Augment — the Engelbart word. Substrate + human > substrate alone or human alone.
• Suggestion / surfacing — the substrate proactively showing you something relevant you'd otherwise miss.

Scale terms

• Personal cognition — individual-layer applications. See layers/personal-cognition.
• Team cognition — organization-layer. See layers/team-cognition.
• Collective cognition / Humanity 3.0 — civilization layer. See layers/collective-cognition.
• Team Humanity — the conceit that humanity is one multi-tiered organization with OKRs; IdeaFlow is the tool that makes it legible. See framings/team-humanity.
• World Quest — the World-of-Warcraft framing for civilization-scale coordination; inherited from Jacob's mentor Jack Park. See vision-convo → jack-park.

Vocabulary inherited from elsewhere

• Bicycle for the mind — Steve Jobs' Engelbart-style frame, claimed verbatim.
• Medium for thought — Joe Henke's framing (January 2024); widely adopted as house vocabulary.
• Memex — Vannevar Bush (1945). Repeatedly invoked.
• Open Supply Chains — one example application of the "open-source KGs" movement. See framings/open-source-knowledge-graphs.

Deprecated / retired

• "The idea-capture app — never lose another idea again" (2023 marketing) — superseded by cognition-layer framing.
• Mew (product name) — used internally; the public name is now IdeaFlow.

Rules for adding to this glossary

1. A term enters here when it appears three or more times in the #explainingideaflow corpus, or when it's load-bearing in a pitch.
2. Each entry gets: a one-liner definition, the origin/coiner when known, and a pointer to the framing page if it has one.
3. Terms that retire move to "Deprecated / retired" rather than being deleted — past essays still reference them.