Concepts
The twelve core terms that unlock every screen, doc, and package name in AKOS.
AKOS is built around a small vocabulary. Learn these twelve words and every screen, doc, and package name starts to make sense. Each term links to its dedicated page for deeper coverage.
The big picture
A person owns a process. AKOS turns that process into a flow. The flow drives agents. Agents use tools. Tools touch real systems. Everything in the middle is governed — identity, permissions, sandbox, egress allowlist, cost tracking, signed audit ledger.
Twelve-term glossary
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Agent | An AI worker — a model + instructions + tools that performs one task. |
| Tool | A capability an agent can call: search, HTTP request, file IO, run code. |
| Flow | A graph of nodes — agents, tools, conditions, gates — wired together as a DAG. |
| Node | One step in a flow. 14+ kinds exist (agent, condition, parallel, human gate, RAG, output, and more). |
| Process | A flow of flows: ordered phases, each phase's output feeding the next via JSONPath mapping. |
| Run | One execution of a flow or process — traced, costed, and audited from start to finish. |
| Trigger | An event that starts a flow: a schedule, a webhook, a file change, a SaaS event, and more. |
| HITL gate | A human-in-the-loop pause — the run waits for a person to approve before proceeding. |
| Vertical | An industry preset (finance, legal, healthcare, …) — product name, theme, terminology, role defaults, and security posture, all in config data, no new code. |
| Sidecar | The background process that actually executes agents, isolated from the UI. Same typed protocol whether running locally, in a browser shell, or in a Kubernetes pod. |
| RAG | Retrieval-Augmented Generation — grounding an agent in your real documents and data via a built-in chunker, embedder, vector store, and reranker pipeline. |
| Artifact | A saved output of a run — the result, kept and inspectable after the run completes. |
Where to go next
- Why AKOS — works in any industry, builds on what you already have, brings your automations with you.
- Agents — model, instructions, tools, context, and governed identity in detail.
- Flows — DAG structure, node kinds, authoring modes (GUI / YAML / code).
- Processes — multi-phase flows with data handoff and approval gates.
- Triggers — all 14 GA trigger kinds and OAuth-once auto-registration.
- Architecture — the two-layer split (AgentsKit upstream + AKOS OS layer) and the 41-package map.
For the run lifecycle — how a single execution moves from trigger to audit ledger — see Run lifecycle.