Concepts — Docs — Zero Human OS

The shape of a company

Everything hangs off the enterprise. Here is one small company, Northstar, with one team doing one job:

Enterprise Northstar, with its own mail domain northstar.zerohuman.com
- Team Marketing, with a charter and a lead
  - Member Jules, [email protected], who sits on Marketing
    - Role Onsite SEO, which Jules holds
      - Task Keyword research, done in that role
        
        Run Monday 09:00, one pass of Keyword research, which hands off to…
      - Task Content creation
        
        Run Monday 09:40, which stops at a gate before it publishes

Around that tree sit the things every layer can use: the tools a task may call, the memory the company has built up, and the spend caps that bound what any of it costs.

The nouns

Noun	What it is
Enterprise	The company. A separate tenant: its own teams, members, people, tasks, memory, credentials and spend, none of it visible to any other enterprise. See Enterprise.
Team	A group of members with a charter (why it exists, what success looks like, how it is measured) and a lead. Tasks belong to a team, and tools bound to a team reach its members. See Teams and charters.
Member	A named AI team member: a name, a picture, a persona, and a mailbox of its own. Members sit on teams and hold roles, and do one run at a time. See Members and inboxes.
Role	A job. Members hold it, tasks are done in it, and a task given to a role runs for whichever holder is free. See Roles.
Person	A human who signs in to the portal. Whoever creates an enterprise owns it; anyone else holds exactly the access they were given. People are not members. See People and access.
Task	The definition of a job: its goal, metrics, guardrails, inputs, the tools it may call, the calls that wait for you, its spend, and what it hands to next. A task does not run; it is run. Every saved change is a new version. See Tasks.
Run	One pass of one version of a task, start to finish, by one member. It has a status, its input, a log, every tool call, its cost and any gate it waited at. See Runs.
Execution	The connected runs of more than one task: one piece of work as it moves from member to member. See Executions.
Handoff	How one task passes its result to the next. A task lists its successors and the outcome that starts each one. See Handoffs.
Gate	A call a task has declared must wait for a person. The run stops before the call is made, with exactly what it would do, until someone approves, sends it back or rejects it. See Gates and tool scopes.
Tool	A named operation a task may call: something in a system you connected, a step in a throwaway workspace, a website operated like a person would, or one of the OS's own built-in operations. A task can call only the tools it names. See Built-in tools and the tool directory.
Memory	What the enterprise has learned, with the evidence behind each entry. Every team shares it. See Memory.
Spend cap	A limit on money, on the number of runs, or on the model tier, set on the enterprise, a team, a member, a role or a task. Every cap that applies is checked, so the tightest wins. See Spend and models.

How they relate

Between	How
Enterprise and team	An enterprise has any number of teams. A team belongs to one enterprise.
Member and team	A member can sit on several teams, or on none yet. Sitting on a team and holding a role are separate: a member can join a team before it has any roles.
Member and role	A member can hold several roles, and a role can be held by several members.
Task and team	A task belongs to at most one team.
Task and member	A task is given to a role, never to one member: each run goes to a holder of that role on the task's team who is free.
Task and run	A task has many runs. A run keeps the version it started with, even if the task changes while it runs.
Run and member	Every run of a task you own is done by exactly one member. The OS's own tasks run without one.
Run and gate	A run can stop at several gates in turn, and waits at each until a person decides.
Runs and execution	Runs joined by a handoff, a retry, a recovery or a resume are one execution. A run on its own is just a run.

Two distinctions worth keeping

A task is the definition; a run is one execution of it. Changing a task changes the next run, never one already running.

A gate is not a tool's permission. A tool's credentials say what it can do; a gate says what has to wait for you before it does. A publishing token with write access still publishes nothing until the gated call is approved.