# Glossary

The words Graphdom uses, in the order you meet them.

Studio, the CLI and these docs use the same words with the same meaning.

| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Site | A web portal: one or more origins, such as `https://quotes.toscrape.com`. |
| Task | What an expert does on a site, and the unit a spider automates. For example, "search quotes by author". |
| Expert | The person who knows the task and records it. Experts use Chrome, never Studio or the CLI. |
| Session | One recording of a task by one expert. A directory in the archive. |
| Action | One thing the expert did in a session: a click, a typed value, a choice, a submit. |
| Archive | The directory where sessions are written: `archive/<host>/`. See [The archive](/concepts/archive/). |
| Relay | The local server the Chrome extension sends recordings to, when experts record in their own browser. |
| Sandbox | The site served offline from the recorded sessions. Spiders are tested here before they touch the real site. |
| Level | How far the sandbox may depart from the recording. Level 1 answers exactly as recorded. Level 2 tolerates values that change on every visit, such as tokens and nonces. Level 3 answers inputs no session recorded and marks those answers as generalised. |
| Spider | The program that performs a task. It is deterministic and versioned (`v1`, `v2`…). |
| IR | The spider's source: a JSON document (`spider.json`) of states, steps, inputs and outputs. The Playwright script is compiled from it. |
| Input | A value the spider types or picks, such as a search query. Each session recorded an example of it. |
| Secret | An input whose value is never stored, such as a password. You pass it at run time. |
| Output | A value the spider reads from the site and returns, such as a list of results. |
| Test | What a session expects: the same requests in the same order and the same final page. Every spider must pass the tests of all its sessions. |
| Build | The step that turns a task's sessions into a spider and proves it against their tests. |
| Runtime | Graphdom's own engine for running a spider. The other target is a compiled Playwright script. |
| Effect | Every step is either a read (looks, navigates) or a submit (sends data the site keeps). The runtime asks before a submit. |
| Drift | The real site no longer matches what was recorded. The spider stops and reports it instead of guessing. In Studio, a task's *Drift* lists its runs that drifted, each with the page before and after, and its repair (`graphdom build --repair`). |