The canonical source is
CONTEXT.md
in the repository, which also carries the internal vocabulary the code and the
tables use. A term appearing in both means the same thing in both.The app and its life
the thing you made
The only word for it. Not a project, a site, a service or a workload.
the act
What you do when you send your work out.
bay ship — and bay deploy is the
same command under its older name, permanently.one attempt at shipping
Has a beginning, an end and an outcome. A ship that fails still produced a
build.
every version, in order
Walkable. Moving along it is rewind; going back to a version that worked is
undo —
bay rollback.you, an agent, or the platform
Asked of every build. When nobody said, the answer is someone — never a
guess, because a wrong name here is worse than no name.
Watching and looking inside
where a build is watched
At the app’s own address, before the app has ever answered. Every movement in
it stands for a real event; a room that animates without something having
happened is a lie. Visible to the owner only.
the moment the Room becomes the app
Not a transition between two pages — the same address, now answering for
itself.
what an owner sees inside their own app
What it is doing, what happened to it, and who is in it. Reached two ways:
brought up over the live app at its own address, or opened as the app’s own
page. One thing seen from two sides. Never visible to a visitor.
everything the X-ray shows at one moment
A single thing, given identically to a person and to an agent — only the
rendering differs. Every reading says what window it is true for.
everything the app did
In one place, for a person and for an agent to read.
bay logs, bay errors.the people in an app right now
Not sessions, not active users. The people in it.
Ways in, and what is not code
a way into an app from outside
Not a route, an endpoint or an ingress.
a domain you own, pointed at your app
An additional Door, never a replacement one: the app keeps answering at
<name>.thebay.cloud, which is the address every share link, log line and
rebuild is still built from. See Domains.the only thing that cannot be written in the code
Not environment variables, not config, not settings. See
Secrets.
a copy given real traffic that answers nobody
Exists so a change can be watched before it is real.
Two words that mean the same thing
bay ship and bay deploy are one command. “Deploy” used to name two different
things — the act you perform, and one recorded attempt at it — so the act became
ship and one attempt became a build. deploy survives as an alias and
always will, because every script and agent prompt already written says it.