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hum

Vocabulary

This page is a quick lookup of every word that appears in the hum codebase as a load-bearing term. Names are chosen so they feel like the thing — readers and writers share the same mental model.

Wire

  • thrum — the bidirectional NDJSON socket between humd and any nestler.
  • tone — one message frame on the thrum. Envelope (chi/rid/sid/…) plus body.
  • chi — the tone’s discriminator. prompt, chunk, finish, gossip-publish, …
  • chis — the list of chi values a bee speaks. Advertised in the hello.
  • sigil — content-addressable session pairing hash. Stable across reconnects.
  • wane — Lamport-clock per sigil. Increments on every state mutation.
  • dusk — absolute ms expiry on a tone. Past dusk, drop.

Daemon

  • humd — the daemon process. One per machine install.
  • HumdId — sha256 of the humd’s Ed25519 public key.
  • hum — one conversation. Has a hum_id, lives on a humd.
  • nest — the place inside humd where bees gather and cells live. Not a process. Not a model. The meeting space. One humd, one nest.
  • cell — one live LLM subprocess living in the nest. The compute itself — what turns a chi:"prompt" into chi:"chunk" + chi:"finish". Fungible: spawn, kill, respawn.
  • brood — the state machine that walks a cell from cold to ready (PTY-only).

Conversation

  • petal — one unit of content (text, image, tool_use, tool_result).
  • petal-cell — a nestler’s view of one petal in its own conversation graph.
  • bloom — one turn of conversation. Starts with a prompt, ends with a finish.
  • wilt — close the bloom.
  • buds — buffered tool events not yet committed.
  • shed — flush the buds.
  • tendril — brokered tool call. Reaches across the wire for execution.
  • sap — accumulated tool input being assembled.

Ensemble

  • ensemble — the mesh of cooperating humds.
  • hive — the kind. A typology slot. Doesn’t run; doesn’t send anything. The conformance an actor must match to be allowed to commission bees. claude-cli is a hive; openai-server is a hive; market-maker is a hive.
  • bee — the instance. A running participant commissioned by a hive. Each bee declares its kinds on chi:"hello" via bee: ["worker"], bee: ["forager"], or both (hybrid bees are allowed).
    • worker — produces compute. Implements the WorkerBee trait (or its non-Rust equivalent) — accepts chi:"prompt" for advertised models and emits chi:"chunk" / chi:"finish" / chi:"tool-call".
    • forager — translates outside wire ↔ thrum. Implements ForagerBee — wraps an HTTP / gRPC / stdio surface into thrum tones.
  • nestler — the bee in the act of joining the nest. The live process sending its first ask: chi:"hello". Awaits the breath that confirms handshake. (Verb-state, not a kind.)
  • nestled — the bee after joining the nest. Same actor, registered. Has a nestledId. Keeps asking throughout the connection — chi:"prompt", chi:"cancel", chi:"tool-result", chi:"release-permit", chi:"cleanup", chi:"curate". Hello is the first ask; nestled is what asks the rest.

The four are not synonyms. Hive describes the kind; bee is the running participant; nestler arrives; nestled inhabits. The transition nestler → nestled is one of state, not function: the actor is an asker through both. A nestled bee shares the nest with the cells that live there, and continues sending chi at it until disconnect.

Observation

  • drone — the sentinel watching every tone. Self-governance + drift detection.
  • drift — timing rings per bloom. p50/p95 across humds.
  • penny — lifetime counters. Token swaps, tool executions, etc.