/kiss

Terms from bassclef vocabulary that appear on this page.

luminary

A design or engineering thinker whose discipline bassclef borrows as a review lens — the practitioner in the cameo pattern above. Cooper for personas, Norman for signifiers, Feathers for characterization tests, Beck for TDD rhythm, plus about 90 others. Skills invoke a lens to check work against a specific discipline. `/luminary` browses the catalog. See: /docs/skills/luminary, doi:10.5281/zenodo.22145491

primitive

A building block of bassclef — a skill, a rule, a hook, a luminary, or an agent. Adopters compose primitives into workflows. The lite tier ships one primitive of each kind (except luminaries — lite ships 4, standard adds more, ultra loads the full 96). See: /docs/config/tier-system

INSTEAD-block

The pairing rule bassclef writing follows — every 'don't do X' statement comes with an actionable 'INSTEAD do Y' alternative. Comes from Anthropic's context-engineering discipline. If you can only say 'don't', you probably need to figure out what the reader SHOULD do.

load-bearing

A part of the system that other parts depend on — remove it and downstream things break. Bassclef uses the word for artifacts that other artifacts read: a canvas is load-bearing when a spec cites it, a spec is load-bearing when Builder uses it. Plain equivalent: 'actually used' or 'counted on'.

composer

A bassclef skill that runs other skills as a chain. `/launch` composes `/interpret-input` + `/luminary` + `/stage` + `/spec` + `/decompose`. `/build` composes `/verify` + Builder dispatch. You invoke the composer; it invokes its parts. See: /docs/skills/launch, /docs/skills/build

temperance

The pause-and-think gate that fires before any non-trivial work. Two questions — am I building the right thing AND am I building it the right way? Bassclef enforces it with a pre-build hook that BLOCKs edits until a temperance marker exists on the branch. See: /docs/skills/temperance

GRASP

Craig Larman's General Responsibility Assignment Software Patterns — 9 principles for assigning responsibility to objects (Information Expert, Creator, Controller, Low Coupling, High Cohesion, Polymorphism, Pure Fabrication, Indirection, Protected Variations). `/decompose` uses GRASP to identify interfaces + responsibilities from a spec.

chronicle

A narrative log of what a session shipped — what worked, what did not, what got deferred. Written at session-end. Bassclef's chronicles live under `docs/chronicles/YYYY-MM-DD-slug.md`. Chronicles are how future sessions understand context that the code alone cannot show. See: /docs/skills/session-log

whereami

The authoritative project-state snapshot — current phase, active goals, subsystem status, gate progress, session recap history. Read at session-start; updated at session-end. The one file every new session should read first to know where the project stands. See: /docs/skills/whereami

hook

A shell script bassclef wires into Claude Code's tool-invocation lifecycle. Hooks fire at events like PreToolUse (before an Edit lands) or SessionStart (when a session opens). Hooks enforce rules mechanically — a rule says 'don't do X'; a hook fires and BLOCKs if X happens.

rule

A markdown file auto-loaded into every session's context. Rules pin discipline the agent applies to every response (plain-English writing, blocked-items protocol, temperance gates). Different from a hook — rules are steering; hooks are enforcement.

skill

A user-invocable command (like `/kiss` or `/temperance`) that runs a specific bassclef workflow. Every skill lives at `.claude/skills/<name>/SKILL.md` with frontmatter + procedure. Adopters type the slash command; Claude Code loads the skill and runs it.

adopter

A repo that has bassclef installed — either via `bassclef init` (lite tier from npm) or via the symlink pattern (standard tier with an Anthropic key). Bassclef's discipline: never break adopters. Every change to a downstream-observable surface ships with a compat shim.

bassclef-upstream

The private repo where bassclef substrate is authored. Ships to a public `bassclef` npm package + a public `bassclef-web` docs site. Adopters read the public tier; the operator maintains upstream.