Ubiquitous language for the Weaver project. Terms are added as they crystallize in design sessions. No implementation details live here.
A self-contained, always-available surface living on the desktop layer. Ranges from a live data display (clock, visualizer, graph) through interactive controls (media controller with seek, todo with text input) up to a tiny self-contained app (pomodoro with settings, chat overlay, simple game).
Boundary: embedded live web content (a rendered webpage) is not a Widget. Widgets reach the web through APIs, not by embedding pages. (Decided 2026-07-12: web embedding is very low priority and likely cut — "since we have APIs the need for this is zero.")
A data source collected once by the host and fanned out to every subscribed Widget (system stats, media, time, weather). Distinct from a Widget's own direct API access: Providers are shared and curated; direct API access is per-Widget and declared.
A Provider is either live, silent, or unavailable. Silence is valid live data; unavailable means the host cannot honestly collect the source because the OS, hardware, permission, or route is missing. An unavailable Provider sends no fabricated live frames. Platform permission language stays in host diagnostics and setup UX rather than entering Widget source.
The internal path that turns a Widget's retained display operations into pixels and presents them on its OS surface. Renderer policy is platform-owned: the healthy path, reference/fallback path, resource lifetime, and any helper process may differ by OS, but Widget source and the public SDK never do. Its bill always includes every participating Widget, host, and renderer process.
What a Widget may do without any user-facing consent: subscribe to Providers, call network origins it declared in its manifest, and keep its own scoped key-value state.
Weaver's core product motion, three verbs on one flywheel: Conjure (prompt your agent, a widget appears on your desktop), Share (send the widget — which is always its source), Remix (your agent patches someone else's widget to your taste). Each verb's output is the next verb's input. None stands alone; the platform is designed so that building Conjure makes Share and Remix nearly free.
Creating a widget by prompting your own agent, prompt-to-desktop in under a minute. The primary authoring act in Weaver; hand-writing widget code is the special case, not the norm.
The portable, shareable form of a Widget: readable source and assets plus an auditable declared surface, provenance, and lineage. Never a compiled artifact or a pointer to its author's workspace — opening a .weave IS reading the Widget (ADR 0004).
A Widget Weaver has accepted into the local library. Its runnable source is a Weaver-owned copy made from a .weave, never the sender's working directory; changing it begins a Remix.
The act of personalizing someone else's Widget by having your agent patch its source — restyle it, resize it, rewire its data. Remixing is Weaver's answer to personalization; there is no global theming system. The author's shipped look is the intended vision; making it yours is a remix, not a runtime override.
Anything that touches the user's machine beyond the standard surface. Not one bucket — a ladder: notifications (harmless) → launch app / open URL (mild) → run commands / read arbitrary files (dangerous). The dangerous rungs exist but require loud, explicit, per-Widget consent. Weaver deliberately rejects the genre-incumbent posture where skins can simply do anything.