Core concepts

Cohalen has a small, fixed vocabulary; the app, these docs, and the code use these nouns the same way. Each entry below states what one noun means.

Repository

The connected git source Workspaces branch from. Locally it is your own clone, a folder on your machine; across an Organization it is shared as a reference (a name and a remote), and each Member keeps their own clone. Distinct from a Workspace, which is the work branched off it.

Workspace

The unit of parallel work: one isolated git worktree, its branch, a running environment, and an agent chat, plus the Diff, Checks, and pull-request lifecycle that follows. You run many Workspaces in parallel, each owned by one agent.

Changeset

The complete set of files a single agent changed in one task, measured against the Workspace's Base branch: commits on the branch plus uncommitted edits, which is exactly what the pull request will contain. You review it as a whole. The Diff view presents one Changeset; it is not a general multi-commit browser.

Checks and the Verdict

Checks is the merge-readiness surface and the last review pass before Ship. It aggregates the signals that decide whether a Workspace can merge (Git status, Check runs, Deployments, review Notes, and Todos) and reduces them to a single Verdict sentence at the top, such as Uncommitted changes, Ready for pull request, or Ready to merge. When something blocks the merge, the Verdict says so and counts what remains: failing Checks, open Todos, or unresolved comments. The Verdict is expressed as language and monochrome state, never a fabricated percentage, and it selects the one primary action available at that moment.

Ship

The fourth stage and the finish line: the commit, pull request, merge spine, executed with git and your GitHub connection. The Verdict selects one action at a time: Commit & push (sweeps up leftover uncommitted changes), Create PR (the Workspace's agent drafts the body), and Merge (squash by default). A failure at any step, such as a rejected push or branch protection, surfaces in Checks rather than passing silently.

Organization and Members

An Organization is a team of authenticated Members: it owns the shared Repositories and Workspaces and is the boundary of visibility and access, so a Member sees only their Organization's work. Members collaborate on review (Notes, Todos, comments).

Owner

The one Member on whose machine a Workspace runs; its worktree, agent, terminal, and files live there. Execution-bound actions (editing files, using the terminal, prompting the agent) belong to the Owner alone. Review actions (Notes, Todos, merge) are open to any Member.

Remote Workspace

A Workspace whose Owner is another Member, mirrored into your client read-only. The Chat and Diff stream in live, so you can review a teammate's work as it happens, but execution stays on the Owner's machine: a shared Workspace means shared visibility and review, not shared execution.

"Remote" names where the Workspace runs, not a separate kind of thing. Every Workspace in an Organization is visible to its Members; a Remote Workspace is one that runs on someone else's machine.

Spend kill-switch

The per-Workspace budget meter, in plain language the spend cap: it counts the tokens a Workspace's Turns have used and refuses to start another once the count crosses the cap, so a Workspace left running unattended stops there. It is on by default and never disabled silently. You set the cap per Workspace or as a default. The meter reads each agent's own reported usage, so it covers Claude Code and Codex; Cursor publishes no per-Turn usage and is not metered.

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Next: Architecture, where these pieces run and what crosses the machine boundary.