Glossary

These are the words you’ll see in Evergreen and in these docs, as the app uses them.

Workspace

A workspace is your organization’s place in Evergreen. It has its own people, roles, projects, integrations, balance, and settings, which you manage under Workspace settings. A person can belong to more than one workspace.

Role

Everyone in a workspace is an Owner, an Admin, or a User. There’s one Owner, Admins manage the workspace, and Users run their own sessions. See Roles.

Project

A project groups related sessions, with its own people, notes, and shared context. The agent saves notes in a project for later sessions, and everyone on the project can read them. A project can be visible to the whole workspace, to a team, or private, and it can have sub-projects that inherit context and people from it.

Session

A session is one piece of work the agent does for you, from your first message to the pull request. You start one from New or a project with a brief, and watch it, answer it, or step in whenever you like. You can share a session with someone as a Collaborator, who can message the agent and answer it, or a Viewer, who can read along.

A session is Public or Private. Anyone in the workspace can find a public session, but a private one opens only for the people with access. See Work together.

Brief

The brief is what you tell the agent at the start of a session. It answers “What should the agent do?”, and you can describe a task, ask a question, or drop in a file.

Plan

A plan is what the agent proposes before it changes anything. In the Plan permission mode, the agent reads the repositories and writes a plan, and nothing changes until you approve it. New sessions start in Auto unless you choose another mode, so the agent goes straight to work.

Ask

An ask is a question the agent needs you to answer before it can go on. It shows up as waiting on you, with a number of asks waiting, and the kind says what it needs: Permission, Question, Plan approval, Repositories, Follow-up, Reconnect, or another. Under When it needs an answer, each session either Waits for you or Carries on without you.

Follow-up

A follow-up is something a session left for later, such as a check on a deploy or a clean-up. Your follow-ups due show on Standup. See Follow-ups.

Preview

A preview is an app the agent starts in its environment, such as a dev server, which you open on a page of its own. The session links to it under Artifacts, and it stays live while the agent’s environment is up.

Shepherd

The shepherd looks after a pull request once it’s open. It fixes failing checks, handles review comments and conflicts, and merges, as far as you let it. See Pull requests for the modes that set how far it goes.

Validation tier

A validation tier is the extra proof you require before a pull request merges, on top of the repository’s required checks. The app calls it Testing and, when you start a session, Before it merges, also require. See Pull requests for the levels.

Automation

An automation starts sessions for you, on a schedule or when something happens in GitHub, Jira, Sentry, Slack, Datadog, a CI check, or a webhook. Evergreen can check each event first, and pick the project it belongs to. See Automations in the app.

Free week

Each person gets one free week, in the first workspace they own that starts one. It counts from that workspace’s first session. During it Evergreen’s own fees are free, and the model is still charged. See Pricing.