Concepts

Universe

A universe is one Yoke control-plane database plus the projects, workflows, strategy docs, events, and delivery state inside it. Local mode births a universe on your laptop. Cloud and self-hosted each host one (or more) for your organization.

Organization (Cloud)

On Yoke Cloud, an organization wraps a hosted universe. Members, billing, and machine access are organization concerns. The workbench URL looks like app.upyoke.com/orgs/<slug>#/....

Project

A project is where code deploys and where backlog items are scoped. One work item targets one project. Cross-project work becomes separate items.

Projects bind:

• a git checkout (or remote)
• GitHub repo (optional, depending on sync mode)
• capabilities, packs, QA plans, delivery flows
• strategy corpus

Items

Work is an item with a public ref like PREFIX-N. Content lives in structured fields (spec, design, plan, …); the rendered body is virtual.

Orthogonal flags: blocked, frozen — they do not replace lifecycle status.

Workflows

Every item pins an immutable workflow version. Built-ins:

Workflow	For
Dash	One instruction, execute end to end
Issue	Bounded change; item body is the spec
Epic	Architect decomposition + task lanes
Blitz	Document-led plan as integrated slices

See Workflows and reference/lifecycle.md.

Workbench tabs

The universe workbench sidenav is the operator map: Overview, Inbox, Strategy, Frontier, Items, Sessions, Delivery, QA, Workflows, Capabilities, Events, Doctor, Ouroboros, Projects, Access, Packs, GitHub, settings, Members, Billing. This docs set follows that map.