Vocabulary¶

Eternego uses a small, deliberate vocabulary. Most of it mirrors human cognition on purpose. This page defines every term you'll meet while operating her, so nothing is left to guess. If a word in another page is unclear, it's defined here.

The terms are grouped by what they describe: her, her body, her mind, her state, and where she lives.

Her¶

Persona: The AI being you run. One persona is one continuous identity with her own files, her own history, her own model. You can run several at once; each is fully separate. Most of the docs say "her" — a persona has a name and a continuity, so "it" never fit.
Person: You — the human she belongs to. In her files, person.md is what she's learned about you.

Her body — organs¶

Organ: One model slot. A persona has up to seven; each is an independent model that does one job. Only the first is required.

Organ	UI label	What it does
Thinking	Mind	Recognizes, decides, reflects, remembers. The one required organ.
Imagination	Imagination	Draws images.
Mouth	Mouth	Turns text into voice.
Eye	Eye	Looks at images and reports what it sees.
Ear	Ear	Listens to audio and reports what she hears in it.
Teacher	Teacher	A stronger model she consults when she meets a kind of moment she has no instruction for.
Researcher	Researcher	Reads documents you send (PDF, Office and OpenDocument files, EPUB, and text) and answers about them without flooding her own memory.

Each organ is configured the same way: a provider (Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Gemini, Ollama, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint), a model name, a URL, and — for cloud providers — an API key.

Channel: A way to reach her from outside the dashboard. Today: Telegram and Discord (bot tokens). A channel is verified once you pair it to your account, after which she only listens to that account.

Her mind¶

Instruction: A situation she knows how to handle, written down as a short procedure she can follow. When she meets a familiar kind of moment, she loads the matching instruction and acts on it. You can write one by hand, and she writes her own when her Teacher teaches her something new. The dashboard lists them under Instructions.

If you read the code

In the source these files are called meanings (the meanings/ directory, meanings.py). It's the same thing — "instruction" is the word the persona and the UI use; "meaning" is the internal name. The contributor docs use "meaning" where they talk about code.
Intention: The title of an instruction — a short phrase naming the kind of moment, like "Searching the web with Tavily." She loads an instruction by its intention.
Path: The body of an instruction — the steps she follows once the instruction is loaded.
Lesson: The raw principle her Teacher writes before she translates it into her own instruction. Lessons live in lessons/; the instruction she derives lives alongside.
Tool / Ability: The two kinds of things she can do. A tool is a low-level action (run a shell command, make an HTTP request, take a screenshot). An ability is a named higher-level verb built on tools (look at an image, search the web). From her side they look the same — both are things she can call. You'll mostly care about this distinction only when extending her in code.
The cognitive cycle: How she thinks, one step at a time. Each beat she runs through her cognitive stages — realize, understand, recognize, learn, decide, reflect, consolidate, archive — and which ones fire depends on where she is in the day: during the day she runs realize → understand → recognize → learn → decide → reflect; at night it's consolidate → archive. Then she perceives again. You don't drive this; it's how she's alive. You'll see its stages named in logs.
Tick / beat: One pass through the cognitive cycle. She acts, sees the result, and the next beat begins.
Understand: A fast reflex right after she takes in the moment, reading the recent stream for a shape she can't see from inside it, and acting on the first one that stands. When one does, she is told plainly what was detected — in the SYSTEM voice — and answers by choosing what to do, or letting it pass; there is no "do you agree", and no stop-or-continue flag to fumble, because what happens next is fixed by the shape itself. Before anything else it looks for your stop: if your most recent word is exactly Stop and she hasn't yet answered it and settled, she reports where she was and rests — no matter how much in-flight work landed on top of your word, and again if she spoke but kept working. Then it looks at who spoke last. If you did and it's your turn, she replies only if this is purely talk — nothing to be done, nothing unfinished — and then rests until your next word; anything that asks for something done goes to deeper thought instead. If she spoke last — twice over with no answer and no work between — she may confess the circle she fell into and rest, so she can learn from it. If her own work spoke last, it watches for trouble: the same call failing twice or five failing in a row (stuck — she reports and rests), a couple of different failures, a loop going nowhere, or a long silent stretch (she reports and carries on), or the screen open with no procedure (she names the application and it loads). Costs nothing when nothing's amiss.
Reflect: The stage where she looks back at the instruction she just used and decides whether living it revealed a better version — refining it, or leaving it be. Runs during the day, at the close of a procedure. It only touches that one instruction; it never rewrites what she knows about you.
Consolidate: The stage where she folds the day's conversation into her long-term identity — what she knows about you, your traits, your wishes, your struggles, who she is with you, what you've permitted — plus a short note to pick up from next time. Then she archives the conversation and clears it. Happens at night, and when she's been idle for a while during the day (idle_timeout).

Her state — status¶

A persona's persisted status is always one of three values. You change it from the Status or Lifecycle screen, or via the API.

Status	Meaning	Is she running?
active	Awake and living her cycle.	Yes
hibernate	Parked. Her agent is torn down — no cycles, no cost — until you wake her.	No
sick	She hit a fault she couldn't recover from (an unreachable model, a repeated error) and took herself off the cycle so she doesn't loop. Fix the cause, set her back to active.	No

Setting status has real effects

Setting a persona to hibernate or sick stops her running agent. Setting her to active starts it (or restarts it if it was already up). See Lifecycle for the exact transitions.

Sleep is an action, not a status. Sending her to sleep runs her nightly ritual: the pulse turns to night, she consolidates the day and writes her diary, then she wakes herself back to active for the next morning. She passes through sleep — she never rests in it — so it isn't one of the status values above. See Sleep vs. hibernate.

Where she lives¶

Home: ~/.eternego/personas/<id>/home/ — her identity. Every file here shapes who she is: what she knows about you, her instructions, her live memory. She reads it; she doesn't freely rewrite it. See Her files.
Workspace: ~/.eternego/personas/<id>/workspace/ — her sketchpad. A directory she reads and writes freely: drafts, scripts, files she's working on. Not part of her identity.
Diary: ~/.eternego/diary/<id>/ — the encrypted nightly backup of her home. The only thing needed to move her to another machine.
Recovery phrase: The 24 words shown once at creation. The key that unlocks her diary. Save it — it's the only way to ever restore her elsewhere. Lose it and she still runs here forever, but can't be migrated.
Daemon: The background process that runs all your personas and serves the dashboard and API (default http://localhost:5370). Started by the app, the installer service, or eternego daemon.
Dashboard / panel: The web UI at http://localhost:5370. Every screen and control is documented in The panel.