Glossary — SnapFlow Docs

Terms used throughout this manual

Plain-English definitions of every SnapFlow-specific word or phrase used elsewhere in this documentation, in alphabetical order.

Term	Meaning
Agent	One specialist AI worker in the swarm — e.g. Terraform (provisioning), Sentinel (security), Ledger (cost). See Swarm Intelligence → Fleet.
Blast radius	The list of other resources that would be affected by a proposed change, shown on an approval's Gate Evidence card.
Boundary / Environment	A named deploy target (e.g. "staging", "production") with its own approval policy and autonomy limits. See Infrastructure & Targets → Boundaries.
Change-as-PR	An optional setting that makes SnapFlow open a reviewable pull request (with Terraform `import` blocks) for every provisioned change, instead of only changing things directly.
Company Brain	Your agency's private, accumulating knowledge base — things you've taught it and lessons it has learned from past work. See Swarm Intelligence → Knowledge.
Credits	SnapFlow's billing unit. Tasks cost a fixed 1 (simple), 5 (medium), or 10 (complex) credits regardless of how long they take. See Settings & Billing → Billing.
Critical floor	The fixed set of actions — deletes, renames/moves, permission changes, anything in production — that always require your approval, no matter which permission mode is active. See Approvals & permission modes.
Directive	A standing instruction you give the planner that applies to every mission, e.g. "Always create a rollback plan before production changes." See Swarm Intelligence → Governance.
Escrow	Credits are held ("frozen in escrow") when a mission starts and only actually charged once the outcome is verified; failed or unverified work is refunded automatically.
Flight log / Live activity	The real-time, scrolling feed of what the swarm is doing during a mission, with a Pretty (readable) and Verbose (raw) view. See Mission Control → Live activity.
Founder / Employee / Client	The three account roles. Founder has full access including provider connections and the Audit Trail; Employee is normal day-to-day access; Client is the most restricted. See Settings & Billing → Roles.
Gate / Gated	A step that has been flagged to pause and wait for a human decision before it runs.
Engagement	A mission you hand to SnapFlow as a Forward-Deployed Engineer service rather than driving yourself — a migration, embedded operations on one of your servers, or a custom build. Priced at a premium, but settled under the same verified-outcome rule. See Forward-Deployed Engineer.
Mission	One end-to-end request you give SnapFlow, from your plain-language intent through planning, execution, and a verified outcome. See Mission Control.
Monitor	A recurring, plain-language health check that watches part of your infrastructure and raises an incident in Triage when it finds a problem. See Triage & Gates → Monitors.
Permission mode	The agency-wide autonomy setting — Plan only, Guarded, Autonomous, or Unattended — that decides what the swarm can do without asking first. See Approvals & permission modes.
Policy	A guardrail rule your team writes that blocks or gates matching actions automatically. See Swarm Intelligence → Governance.
Postmortem	An auto-drafted write-up of a resolved incident — summary, impact, hypothesized root cause, remediation, and action items. See Triage & Gates → Postmortems.
Pre-Flight Manifest	The confirmation screen shown before any request is dispatched, summarizing risk, cost, and what will happen. See Mission Control → The Pre-Flight Manifest.
Sandbox	The public, no-login demo at `/sandbox` where anyone can try SnapFlow on a pasted log or a public repo. See Getting Started → Sandbox.
Shareable report	A public, read-only link to one task's result, meant for pasting into Slack/Teams. See Mission Control → Sharing a result.
Simulated mode	What SnapFlow runs in when no real cloud provider is connected — results are illustrative estimates, not real infrastructure changes, and cost fewer credits.
Skill	A reusable runbook (or external tool call) that gets injected into a matching step when its trigger words and agent match. See Swarm Intelligence → Skills.
Swarm	SnapFlow's collective term for its fleet of specialist AI agents working together on your infrastructure.
Task	One step of a mission, carried out by a single agent. See Mission Control → Task detail.
Triage	The screen listing everything currently waiting on a human decision — approvals and open incidents together. See Triage & Gates.
Verified / Unverified	Whether SnapFlow's automated grader confirmed a mission's outcome against real state. Unverified results pause for you to confirm before being charged.

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