Glossary
These definitions explain how terms are used in this book. They are reading aids, not a replacement for the sources and qualifications in the linked chapters.
| Term | Meaning in the book | Read further |
|---|---|---|
| ACAI | Accumulated Curiosity with Artificial Intelligence: the inquiry, practice, and retained judgment developed throughout the book. | Chapter 7 |
| Acceptance criteria | Properties you can inspect to decide whether a particular result meets its stated purpose. | Chapter 4 |
| Agent | A system that can carry out an authorized sequence using available tools and context; capabilities and autonomy depend on the actual implementation. | Chapter 17 |
| Artifact | A document, example, script, diagram, or other inspectable object produced or used in the work. | Practice index |
| Capability | An operation you can perform and support with appropriate evidence under stated conditions. | Chapter 16 |
| Capacity | The amount of work that fits within stated time or resource constraints; it does not establish demand. | Chapter 22 |
| Claim | A statement whose support, uncertainty, and intended use can be examined. | Chapter 2 |
| Context | Information available to a model or person during a particular task. Available context and durable storage are different things. | Chapter 8 |
| Current selector | A record or route identifying the instruction or artifact currently applicable to the task. | Chapter 11 |
| Distillation | Turning examined material into a concise, scoped record while preserving the evidence and conditions needed to use it correctly. | Chapter 11 |
| Evaluation | Comparing an actual result with relevant criteria and evidence; different evaluations support different claims. | Chapter 18 |
| Evidence | Material or observations that support a particular claim within a stated scope. Naming a file does not establish what it contains. | Chapter 2 |
| Himura Inc. | Audy’s fictional workshop-design business used for the running examples. Its conversations, outputs, and financial numbers are authored teaching material. | Chapter 21 |
| First principles | Foundational relationships or premises used to explain a problem, whose applicability still requires examination. | Chapter 5 |
| Handoff | Transfer of a defined responsibility and the required objects to another role or stage. | Chapter 19 |
| Hypothesis | A proposed explanation or expectation that can be investigated and revised in light of evidence. | Chapter 3 |
| Knowledge graph | Entities connected by specified relationships; the book begins with a small manual map. | Chapter 12 |
| Memory | Retained information and judgment, together with the routes and rules that make it available for later work. Storage alone does not prove correct reuse. | Chapter 8 |
| Owner-time allowance | Hours of owner work multiplied by an explicitly assumed hourly value; a comparison input, not automatically a paid wage. | Chapter 22 |
| Polymathy | Developing and connecting understanding across domains while respecting the limits of each comparison. | Chapter 6 |
| Portability | The ability to move and reconstruct relevant work; readable files and successful task behavior require separate evidence. | Chapter 15 |
| Provenance | The origin and history needed to understand where a record came from and what supports it. | Chapter 10 |
| Source fidelity | Preserving what the supplied evidence establishes, including uncertainty, rather than making the result merely look complete. | Chapter 11 |
| Sovereignty | Meaningful control over the direction, authority, records, and dependencies of your work; not the absence of all external services. | Chapter 15 |
| SovMem | The current TFIS name used for its intended sovereign-memory infrastructure. The book’s manual exercises do not by themselves deploy it. | Chapter 9 |
| SSA-CMM | TFIS’s capability maturity model for solo systems architects, using the canonical TFIS homepage ladder: Task Operator; AI-Assisted Operator; Workflow Orchestrator; Agent Supervisor; Multi-Agent Architect; Sovereign Architect. | Chapter 23 |
| Synthetic specimen | An authored input, output, or scene created to make practice inspectable. It is not an observed model run or market result. | Chapter 1 |
| TFIS | The Future Is Solo, whose assets provide the primary philosophy and maturity-model context for the book. | Chapter 1 |
| Transfer | Applying learning in a changed situation; the differences between situations affect what a successful example establishes. | Chapter 16 |
| Unit economics | A model of the revenue, costs, and effort attributable to a clearly defined unit of an offer. | Chapter 22 |
| Verdict | A scoped accept, reject, or rewrite judgment tied to a particular object, its evidence, and a reason. | Chapter 13 |
| Workflow | An organized sequence of operations with defined inputs, outputs, and conditions for continuing or stopping. | Chapter 17 |
For SSA-CMM naming and the variations used by The Functional Life, see the full treatment in Chapter 23 and the primary TFIS sources. The glossary uses the homepage labels consistently. (The Future Is Solo, n.d.-a; The Future Is Solo, n.d.-b)
References
The Future Is Solo. (n.d.-a). The functional life (Field Manual No. 01). Retrieved September 10, 2026, from https://life.thefutureissolo.com/
The Future Is Solo. (n.d.-b). The future is solo. Retrieved September 10, 2026, from https://thefutureissolo.com/