Words of Meaning

The unnamed

Category E failures.

The failure that lives in the space between what was described and what was not. Not a bug in the logic. Not an edge case that was missed. The thing that could not be caught because it had no name.

You can only specify what you can name. What remains unnamed is what remains outside the reach of deterministic verification. The specification is the quality gate. The unnamed is what the gate cannot catch.

The term was suggested by Patrick Rothfuss's Kingkiller Chronicle, in which the Chandrian cannot be governed precisely because their true names cannot be spoken. Naming is power. The unnamed is what escapes governance. The connection between a fantasy novel and requirements engineering theory is not as unlikely as it sounds: both are about the limits of language as a governance mechanism.

In technical contexts, the term remains Category E. The unnamed is for everything else.

Prohairesis

Greek: προαίρεσις. Stoic. Literally: a choosing before.

The deliberate, reasoned formulation of will before action. Not raw desire. Considered, explicit intent. Epictetus called it the one thing fully within your control. The quality of what you achieve depends on the quality of what you intended.

A well-crafted prompt is prohairesis made explicit. A governance template with a success definition field is prohairesis: it forces the submitter to define what they want before the system generates anything. A vague instruction is the absence of prohairesis. The system will answer the question you asked, not the question you meant.

The 20 things you think. The 1 or 2 you manage to capture. That gap is a prohairesis problem.

Logos

Greek: λόγος. Pre-Socratic (Heraclitus), then Stoic.

The rational principle that underlies coherent action. Not a document. Not a rule. The governing reason itself. The principle that makes a thing what it is and that, when understood, makes its behaviour predictable and trust possible.

The specification is not the logos. The specification is the artifact that attempts to express the logos. A specification is complete when it fully expresses the logos of the system. It is incomplete when the logos is still partially latent.

This reframes the quality question: not "is the specification complete?" but "does the specification fully express the logos of the system?"

Telos

Greek: τέλος. Aristotelian.

The end. The purpose. The thing toward which all action is directed. Not the process. Not the output. The purpose that, when clearly held, makes every intermediate step coherent and every deviation visible.

The specification is not the product. The telos is the product. The implementation is the means. The specification is the expression of the telos. When the telos is unclear, no specification can be complete and no implementation can be correct.

Encoded phronesis

Greek: φρόνησις. Aristotelian.

Phronesis is practical wisdom: the capacity for sound judgement in particular circumstances. Not general wisdom. Not technical skill. The specifically human capacity to reason correctly about what to do in this situation, given everything that is true.

Encoded phronesis is the mechanism by which the director's practical wisdom is made transmissible. The specification encodes the judgement into a form the agent can act on. The product is not the specification. The product is the encoded phronesis.

Every task envelope is a unit of encoded phronesis. Every escalation format is a boundary of encoded phronesis. The interface between intention and execution disappears not because the technology improved, but because the phronesis was encoded precisely enough that nothing is lost in transmission.

The harness

English. Etymology: Old French harneis, horse equipment.

The collection of specifications, architectural constraints, and workflow guidance that governs an AI agent's output. The harness is what separates a reliable agent from a merely capable one.

The word was chosen by Birgitta Böckeler in 2026 to describe the governance structure around AI agents, without knowing she was reaching back to Plato's Phaedrus: the charioteer driving two winged horses, one noble and one unruly, governing them with reins and bridle. Harness. Horse tack. The same word, the same problem, 2,400 years apart.

The charioteer does not run. The charioteer governs the thing that runs.

Vibe coding

Contemporary.

The state of building at speed without a verification layer. The motion that resembles progress. The confidence that feels like understanding. The pile of working things that somehow does not add up to the thing you were trying to build.

Not a pejorative. An honest description of a state that most practitioners have been in. The discipline is recognising it from the inside and knowing when to stop.

The unnamed (oracle problem)

See also: Category E, Barr et al. (2015).

For completeness: the oracle problem is the formal grounding. A test oracle is the mechanism by which you determine whether an output is correct. For a class of behaviours, no oracle exists. No specification can determine correct from incorrect output because correctness depends on knowledge that cannot be encoded.

The unnamed is what the oracle cannot reach.