Reference
Terms used across the Specify product and docs.
Terms commonly used across the Specify product and docs.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Workspace | The unit in which a team shares docs, conversations, decisions, and code history, along with members and connected tools. It's the boundary where data is isolated. |
| Node | The core unit of content in a workspace. Documents, folders, and agent rules are all nodes. |
| Document project | The unit that creates and maintains developer docs from a GitHub repository. It ties together a folder, sources, skills, and automation settings. |
| Source | The GitHub repository and branch a document project uses as evidence. |
| Document skill | The writing discipline an agent follows when it generates docs. |
| Auxiliary skill | A reference procedure that helps a document skill. You can select up to 5. |
| Incremental update | A mode that updates docs by applying only the code changes. Supports automatic updates. |
| Full regeneration | A mode that recreates the whole document every time. Doesn't support automatic updates. |
| Proposed update | A suggestion to change a document in response to a code change. It includes the evidence for the change and a before-and-after view. |
| Trigger on push | A trigger that prepares proposed document updates when code is pushed to a source branch. |
| Style guide | Markdown writing rules applied to docs. The project guide takes precedence over the workspace guide. |
| Inbox | Where the progress and results of background tasks collect. |
| Thread | A unit of conversation with an agent. |
| Daily briefing | A daily summary of workspace changes, stale-document alerts, and suggested tasks. |
| RAG | Retrieval-augmented generation. An approach where AI searches workspace materials and uses them as evidence before answering or writing a document. See Workspace RAG. |
| Index | The process of splitting documents and files into chunks and storing them for RAG search. Indexing runs again when you edit a document or upload a file. |
| Standards library | A knowledge source for searching standards such as IEC 62304 and ISO 14971 clause by clause. See Standards library. |
| [GAP] | A marker the agent adds to content that isn't supported by a standard or other materials. A person needs to check it. |
| Reasoning effort | How deeply a model reasons before answering. Choose from Off, Low, Medium, High, Extra, and Max. |
| Connector | An integration that connects an external service such as GitHub, Notion, or Slack so the agent can read from it and work with it. |
| Plugin | A package that bundles several skills for installation in one step. Example: medical-device-docs. |
| Automation | A routine that has the agent run a prompt on a set schedule. |
| MCP | Model Context Protocol. An open standard for connecting AI agents to external tools and data. |
| Specify MCP | The MCP server that provides workspace context to external coding agents such as Claude Code and Codex. |
| MCP token | A workspace-level token external editors use to authenticate with Specify MCP. Read-only by default. |