Technical glossary

These are terms from how the Editor and the Viewer are built, not terms a designer needs to use Desde day to day. For those, see the glossary.

Applicator#

A small piece of code that makes one specific kind of edit to source, without an AI model, for example "change this prop's value" or "move this element". Each one rewrites the exact characters in the file rather than describing a change to a model. Most edit kinds have a separate applicator per framework (a Vue one and a React one), but the two sets are not identical, and a few kinds exist only for Vue. See Why most changes are instant.

Attach mode#

The arrangement where you start your own dev server and the Editor attaches to it, instead of the Editor starting the dev server itself. It never loads your config or owns the process in this mode. See Attach mode.

Attribution#

Working out what you actually clicked. When you select something in the preview, attribution decides which component owns it and which prop or slot produced it, so the edit lands in the right place in source. It uses the component's manifest and rendering hints to do this. See Your design system, understood.

Backup journal#

A copy of a file's previous contents, written to .desde/backups/ before any Editor write touches the original. It is a manual recovery trail, not the Undo button and not git. See retention settings.

Branch mode#

The Editor's saving model: edits write your real source files in the currently checked-out branch's working tree, immediately, with no Save step. It is the only mode. An earlier per-session worktree model was removed, and the old EDITOR_WORKTREE_MODE and EDITOR_BRANCH_MODE variables no longer change anything. See Commit, branch and push.

Bridge#

The script that runs inside the prototype's iframe: it handles selection, highlighting, comment pins, and the inspector overlay, and talks to the surrounding app by message passing. The word covers two things: the source, which is the modules in src/bridge/, and the built file those compile into (dist/bridge-bundle.js), which is what both the Editor and the Viewer actually serve. See How a click becomes a change.

data-desde-src#

An attribute of the form file:line:column that the Editor stamps onto elements as your dev server serves them, recording where in your source each element came from. It is what lets a click in the preview become an edit to a specific line. It is added in memory at serve time and never written into your files. See How a click becomes a change.

Deterministic#

Describes an edit whose destination in source can be proven before it is made, so it can be applied by an applicator with no AI model. Most edits in Desde are deterministic. See Why most changes are instant.

Dormant lane#

An edit kind the Editor still implements but no longer offers. Its controls are absent from the Editor and the edit API refuses it, until the project opts back in with a lanes entry in desde.config.json. Narrower than "removed": lanes.detach and lanes.swap name two lanes whose applicators, and whose tests, are intact and unchanged. A lane whose tests were allowed to rot could never be un-dormanted. See editor configuration.

Drift#

The Editor noticing that what it knows about your components disagrees with what actually rendered: a hint that no longer matches, a component missing from the catalog, or a prop nobody declared. Drift signals are advisory: they mean attribution may get worse, not that an edit was wrong. See Your design system, understood.

Grounding#

Everything the Editor knows about your design system (component manifests, design tokens, and project conventions), made available to both the Inspector and the chat agent. The point is that a change lands as your button component with your tokens, not as generic markup. See Your design system, understood.

Host#

The Editor's name for one way of running a dev server in-process: a plain Vite host, plus one for Nuxt, React Router and Next.js. Which host runs, and whether one is turned off in favor of attach mode, is config the Editor reads at boot. See Editor configuration.

Lane#

An edit path in the Editor. Most edits take the deterministic lane, described under Deterministic above. A small number take the AI lane instead, described in Why most changes are instant. A dormant lane is a third sense of the word: an edit kind that exists in code but is switched off by default.

Provenance#

Where a piece of grounding information came from: hand-authored by a person, inferred by a tool, or generated automatically. A rendering hint's provenance, together with whether it has been checked against the real component, decides whether it is trusted enough to route an edit on its own. See Your design system, understood.

Rendering hint#

The part of a manifest that says where an input shows up in the rendered output, for example "the title prop becomes the text of the .card-title element". This is what makes clicking a piece of text resolve to the prop that produced it. Hints record who wrote them and whether they have been checked against the real component. See Your design system, understood.

dsv_ token#

A Viewer personal access token, of the form dsv_<id>_<secret>. It authenticates as the person who created it and grants exactly what that person can already do. It is never an admin key. Only a hash is stored, so the full token is shown once when you mint it and cannot be recovered afterwards. See Deploy a prototype for the calls that need one.