Glossary
Written by: Fatih
These are the meanings we use in what we publish. You may see a term used differently elsewhere; what we mean by it is written here. The glossary has two halves: the terms of the subject, and then the terms of our own method. We write the second half because a phrase like “first seen” reads as ordinary language to you and denotes a defined field to us.
AI agent
Software that, given a goal, chooses its own steps, can call tools, and can judge the result. An agent is defined by its behaviour, not by where it runs or what brand it carries.
The practical consequence: having “agent” in a product name does not make something an agent, and a script running a fixed chain of commands is not one either. The question we ask when drawing the line is single — who chooses the steps?
Model release
A dated, versioned publication of a model or library, recorded from the source's own release feed. A release means the software moved; it does not by itself mean the software improved. The two are often confused.
We take a release from the source's own feed, never from a second-hand news summary. A releases list or a package feed states in the source's own words that the publication happened; a news article relays the event through an interpretation, and interpretation can shift the date.
Machine-customer payment
Protocols that let one piece of software pay another for a service without a human in the loop. One of them, x402, publishes a live 30-day window on its own site: when we read it on 4 Sep 2026 it showed 75.41M transactions, $24.24M in volume, 94.06K buyers and 22K sellers.
We read those figures as a position, not as a revenue promise. The buyer and seller counts on that page differ markedly from our own earlier measurement — a good illustration that in a fast growing field a snapshot from three months ago does not describe today. That is why the older snapshot was not deleted from our ledger; a newly dated row was written above it.
Status label
A marker for how much weight a claim may bear. Definitions are on the Evidence policy page.
The label does not say whether a claim is true; it says how much support it has. A weakly supported claim need not be false — it simply may not be written in confident language.
First seen
The moment we first observed a record. It need not equal the source's publication date, and the archive shows both separately.
The stamp is written once and preserved in later rounds. On some rows the field is empty: records inherited from before watching began have no known first-seen date, and it is not filled in afterwards.
Stable key
The fixed identity that lets us recognise a record across rounds as the same record. The key is built from durable fields the source provides, so a changed title does not create a second record. Without a stable key, “new” and “seen again” would blur together and the archive would inflate on every round.
Append-only archive
A record format in which lines may only be added, never rewritten. Even a wrong line is not deleted; it is struck through and its reason recorded. This makes “when did we know” impossible to edit after the fact — and the price is that gaps which can never be filled stay permanently visible.
Dropped record
A record that has fallen out of the source's own list but remains in our archive. Most sources return a “most recent N” window; once an item falls out it is no longer visible at the source. It stays visible here, because the job of an archive is to remember what the source forgot.
Fail-closed round
A measurement round abandoned in full when any single part of it fails. If one channel errors, that day's state is never written. The opposite behaviour — fail-open — publishes whatever it has and renders the gap invisible; in a publication that talks about measurement, that becomes a quiet lie.
Source chain
The four links of a channel: the source's human-readable page, the endpoint the engine actually calls, that endpoint's official documentation, and the source's terms of use. All four are written out as addresses on every channel page, and the endpoint address on the page is compared against the address in the engine's code at every check.
Rate limit
The ceiling a source sets on how many requests it accepts in a given period. The limits are stated in the source's own documentation — for example GitHub's REST rate limits — and they, not our preferred frequency, set the pace of watching.
Preprint
An academic text published without peer review. Most arXiv records are of this kind. A preprint announces a finding rather than confirming it, which is why a sentence resting on a preprint cannot be written here in confident language.
8-K filing
The form a US public company files to report a material development. We watch these through SEC EDGAR full-text search. A company's own official filing is a different class of evidence from a news article about the same event: the first one is signed.
Primary and secondary source
A primary source is a party's own publication: the company's filing, the regulator's official text, the project's own release feed. A secondary source is a third text relaying it. Secondary sources are not banned, but their status is lower and they are used with the source named; two independent secondary sources agreeing replaces a primary source only in part.
Verdict
A human-written interpretation drawn from observations. A verdict is not an observation and is labelled as such; every published verdict carries at least one source address. Unsourced verdicts are counted before publication, and if the count is not zero the issue does not ship.
Noise filter
A rule capping how many lines a very frequently publishing source may write in one round. The filter deletes nothing; it caps the lines written that round, and what it caps is stated on the channel page. A filter whose formula cannot be shown produces something as unquestionable as the record itself.
Gate
A mechanical check that runs before publication and returns a binary result. Green ships, red does not. The proof that a gate really works is that it turns red when you deliberately break the rule; a gate that never turns red is decoration rather than a gate.
User-Agent
The identifying string our requests carry, saying who we are. It appears in the source's server logs and contains an address at which we can be reached. A crawler that hides itself cannot be accountable to the source it watches.