Glossary Acceptance criteria. Plain-language statements of what must be true for a change to count as done. Sphere turns them into checks. Approved goal. A change someone wants, stated functionally and approved before Sphere starts work. Architecture-guided delivery. Planning and building from a model of the whole system rather than a single prompt or file. Autoplay. Continued planning, implementation and verification across related work with less repeated prompting. Board / Diagram. The visual view of the system model in Sphere Desktop. Supporting surface — not where you are expected to spend most of your time. Chat. Home screen of Sphere Desktop: conversational architect/orchestrator surface where goals, proposals, and approvals happen. Checked result. A change that has passed verification and is ready for human review and merge. Coding agent / coding harness. An AI tool that writes and edits code, plus the tooling that drives it. Sphere works with these. Component. A part of a system: service, app, data store, agent or external system. Connected system. One managed application or platform in Sphere, possibly spanning several services and repositories. Connection. A link between components showing what talks to what. Drift. When the architecture model, plans and real code no longer match. Flow. A structured piece of work or process captured in Sphere that uses the system model. Living model. The system model kept up to date as changes land, rather than a one-off diagram. Plan. Sphere's description of a change: what will change, where, and how it will be verified. In Desktop, plans and roadmaps live under Plans. Revise. Refining a plan against the architecture and review feedback before it is built. Runs. Desktop view of build and verification activity for plans. SCAN. System and Component Architecture Notation — the open, free notation Sphere is built on. The free browser whiteboard at app.spherescan.io is SCAN-only, not Sphere Desktop. Sphere Desktop. Primary Sphere product (Windows and macOS): chat-first architect and orchestrator. See sphere-desktop.md. Verification. Running a plan's checks against the built change. Viewer. A person who can see a workspace without running delivery work. Viewers are not charged.