Glossary
The vocabulary of the instrument.
The terms Holonograph uses, grouped by where they sit in the measurement. Each says what it means and what it deliberately does not claim.
The four sources of drift
Drift resolves to one of four sources. They are kinds of change, not parts of the system, and each is placed by two attributes the architecture already records: control (operator or vendor) and visibility (transparent or opaque).
- Substrate
- An operator-controlled change to the agentic system: a prompt, a tool, a deliberate model swap. Transparent, and yours.
- Light sourcethe light the lens reads
- A vendor-controlled change to a model, including a silent same-alias re-route. Opaque, and not yours.
- Lens
- An operator-controlled change to the evaluation configuration: rubric, fixtures, baselines, cohort scheme. Not the model.
- Noise
- Irreducible per-call non-determinism. The floor a real change has to clear before it counts as signal.
Reading the change
How a shift becomes a source you can act on, and how honestly the reading reports its own limits.
- Completeness
- The account of what Holonograph could and could not resolve, with drops, unresolved surfaces, and call routes counted and typed rather than hidden.
- Conformance
- Whether a judge actually ran against its fixtures, or silently defaulted. A verdict without conformance is a number without a reliability.
- Drift
- Change in a reading over time. Every drift resolves to one of the four sources.
- Facet
- A within-lens configuration: the cross product of rubric, judge, and context scope. Only declared facets are resolved.
- Floor
- The calibration baseline of irreducible non-determinism. Conditional on the judge's light source, and recalibrated when it changes.
- JudgeLLM-as-a-judge
- A model, or a model and rubric, that scores an output. Always a model; subject to the same drift as any model call, so its reliability is measured too.
- Rubric
- The criteria a judge applies. An operator revision to a rubric is lens drift, not a model change.
- Topology
- The full map of declared surfaces and their call routes, scanned so coverage and blind spots can be counted.
- Variance decomposition
- Separating the real change in a score from the part explained by the floor, so a quiet release reads as quiet.
Architecture
Where the instrument sits, and the structures the reading is built from.
- Lens architecture
- The instrument sits above the agent at the call boundary and reads every model call in both directions. It is not part of what it measures.
- Longitudinal store
- The append-only record of readings over time. The substrate every trend and reconciliation is computed from.
- Multiplexer
- Cross-vendor comparison on identical terms. One lens reads across providers without resetting the baseline.
- Run mode
- Whether a call was production or evaluation. Declared, carried, and never inferred; unknown provenance is rejected.
- Sidecar
- A complement channel supplying correlation identifiers and substrate context. Context enrichment, never a second observer or a data-ingestion path.
- Snapshot
- A frozen moment of the system, held so a later reading can be compared against it.
- Substrate column
- The structured record a reading is computed from, carrying the control and visibility attributes that route each change to its source.
- Surface
- A named thing under measurement: a response type, a check, a segment. Surfaces are declared so coverage of them can be counted.
- Surface contract
- What a surface declares it will do, held against what it did, so a mismatch is a verdict rather than a surprise.
Resolution & evidence
What a license governs, and what the top tier can hand to an auditor.
- Active surface
- One registered surface under observation during the license term. The primary meter.
- Attestation
- A SHA-stamped, tamper-evident evidence bundle suitable for a risk function, an examiner, or an auditor.
- Declared facet
- One facet configuration the license resolves. Only declared configurations are resolved and counted.
- Resolution
- How much of your system Holonograph resolves, and how finely it reports what it found. The unit of value, and the axis the tiers name.