Glossary

A single reference for the words you’ll meet using Turbobase, in plain language: what each thing is and when you’d reach for it. For how the named pieces fit together, see Key concepts.

Term	Definition
instance	Your own provisioned Turbobase — your own database plus your own running app, created just for your organization. Nobody else shares it.
Turbobase app	The application that runs in your instance — the one your team opens at <slug>.turbobase.app: your data, Pilot chat, knowledge base, and the Apps surface. “Your Turbobase app” on first mention; “the app” after that.
console	The customer site at console.turbobase.io where you sign in, create and manage instances, connect sources, and see your billing.
organization	The billing and membership entity. Your organization owns your instances and is what invoices bill to. “Org” is fine as a short form.
account	Your personal sign-in identity and profile — who you are when you sign in. Distinct from your organization, which is the shared billing entity your account belongs to.
source	A connectable upstream system you sync with Turbobase, for example Oracle NetSuite, QuickBooks, or Shopify. The default word for the system itself.
connector	The pluggable link mechanism between your instance and one source. Say “source” when you mean the upstream system; say “connector” when you mean the link itself — its contract, its auth, its sync behavior.
canonicalizer	The part of a connector that turns a record shaped the way its source shapes it into the columns you actually query. It is why a customer from NetSuite and a customer from QuickBooks land in the same table under the same column names.
sink	Your canonical mirror — the one database schema every connected source flows into, and the thing your apps, your queries and Pilot all read.
sync	Keeping your canonical mirror current with a connected source. Changes in the source flow to your instance; changes you make can flow back too, once write-back is enabled for that source.
initial sync	The first historical load from a newly connected source into your instance. It runs in the background after you connect; from then on, realtime sync keeps things current.
write-back	The other half of sync: a change you make in Turbobase pushed back to the source it came from. It ships off and is enabled per source, so an instance starts read-only upstream.
sync event	One record’s trip across, in either direction — the source into your instance, or your instance back to the source.
delta cursor	The bookmark sync keeps for each kind of record: how far through a source’s changes your instance has got. It is what makes a re-sync take seconds instead of re-reading the whole history.
originating system	Which side made the most recent change to a row — the source, or Turbobase. It is what stops a change syncing in and then bouncing straight back out again.
source health	The view that tells you whether each connected source is syncing, and what failed if it isn’t.
sync failure	A record that didn’t make it across. The Mechanic works these; you see them on source health.
custom field	A field from your source (or one you add) promoted into a real, queryable column rather than something buried in the raw payload.
custom table	A table you create in your instance for data that doesn’t come from any connected source.
OAuth connect	The one-time authorization step that securely links a source to your instance. You grant access once; Turbobase keeps the connection live from there.
Pilot	Pilot, your AI assistant — the agent you talk to in the app. Answers questions over your data, builds apps from plain-English prompts, and runs scheduled tasks. Also reachable over connected channels.
Mechanic	The sync-healing agent. Watches sync failures, fixes the patterns it recognizes within the autonomy you’ve granted it, and escalates the rest with a recommendation.
Conductor	The behind-the-scenes coordinator: routes events to the right agent, fires notifications, and keeps scheduled work moving. You rarely address it directly.
Concierge	The onboarding agent — the click-path for connecting your particular source, and the check that your credentials actually work.
learning mode	The opening phase of a new instance, while Turbobase learns your rules from real sync rejections. A “Learning” indicator shows in the app until the instance settles.
skill	A capability bundle that teaches an agent one thing well — how to read a particular kind of record, or how a house rule of yours applies. Some ship with Turbobase; you can write and publish your own.
playbook	A long-form operating manual your agents consult: how your business actually handles a situation, written out. Rebuilt nightly from what your instance has learned, so it stays true as you change.
permission tier	How far an agent may act on its own — apply the fix, ask you for one tap first, or escalate it to a person. You set one for each kind of sync failure the Mechanic meets, across your whole instance; every kind starts on one-tap approval, and guardrails then tighten individual operations further.
Analyzer	The customization-analysis surface for a connected source. Inventories source-side customizations — scripts, custom fields, workflows, roles, forms — and surfaces risk and improvement proposals.
risk family	How the Analyzer groups what it finds so you can triage by the kind of exposure: inventory, GL posting, fulfillment, data integrity, and security.
Studio	The chat-first canvas where you and Pilot shape a proposal into the solutions that realize it. You talk in the middle, your inputs sit on the left, and the draft takes shape on the right.
Development	The admin area where changes to your instance are proposed, designed, shipped, and watched — Proposals, Solutions, Releases, App Management, and Processes behind one tab strip.
proposal	A drafted change to your instance, with the evidence behind it. You shape it in Studio, then mark it complete to freeze it — after that, what was approved stays approved.
solution	A concrete deliverable minted from a completed proposal — the thing that actually realizes the change. One proposal can mint several.
solution kind	What flavour a solution is: a hook, a customization, a conduit, config, documentation, an app, a data manipulation, a skill, or native (something your instance already does out of the box).
data manipulation	The solution kind for fixing data: a bounded, previewed, repeatable data change you apply as a one-off job rather than a deploy.
release	A tracked deploy. Every release is gated, audited, watched against a pre-release health baseline, and reversible.
Inputs	The drawer where raw material for proposals collects — notes you drop in, uploaded documents, query results, and signals the platform raises itself. Triage it, then start a proposal from what matters.
signal	Something the platform noticed and thinks is worth reacting to — a risk finding, or a regression spotted after a release — raised into Inputs.
Standards	Your house rules: notes and documents recording how your business wants things built. They ground every proposal, so drafts respect them automatically.
template	A starting point for a proposal — an app, a piece of documentation, or a source change — that seeds the brief so you refine rather than start from blank.
epic / label	Grouping for proposals. An epic collects related work; labels tag it. Both are just ways to find things again later.
task	A job your instance runs to a timetable rather than when you ask — a question put to Pilot, a saved view delivered somewhere, or a system job. Ask Pilot to schedule, pause or stop one, or manage them at /admin/development/scheduled-tasks.
system job	Scheduled work Turbobase runs for you rather than something you set up: the regular re-sync, the check for fields added in your source, and the like. It appears alongside your own tasks.
knowledge base	Your instance’s library of documents and facts. Your team can search it directly, and it grounds Pilot’s answers.
app	An internal app built on your data from a plain-English brief and served inside your instance. Your team opens the apps shared with them from the Apps launcher at /apps.
channel	A notification surface (Slack, …) where your instance delivers alerts, confirmation requests, and scheduled-task results — and where you can talk to Pilot.
hook	A rule that runs on a write before it’s pushed back to a connected source — to validate the change (and reject it if it’s invalid) or to rewrite it into the shape the source expects. Reach for a hook to enforce your own rules on outbound data.
provenance	Where a hook came from: you wrote it, the Mechanic learned it from real sync rejections, or it arrived with a rule book promoted from another of your instances. Shown on every hook, so you always know what you are looking at.
conduit	A bridge that automatically propagates a record from one connected system to another — for example, a customer created in QuickBooks shows up in NetSuite without anyone re-keying it.
extension	What you author with the @turbobase/extensions SDK — your own hooks, conduits and processes — and deploy with the Turbobase CLI.
process	A multi-record sequence an app asks the platform to run — raise a purchase order, wait for the source to post it, then raise the bill — performed on the server in order, with the source’s verdict awaited between steps and a rollback when a step fails.
guardrail	A policy that decides whether a privileged operation is allowed to run at all: allow it, ask for confirmation first, or deny it. Guardrails are the complement to hooks — a hook shapes a write’s content, a guardrail gates whether the operation happens.
write boundary	The one validated path every change into your canonical tables goes through, so hooks, guardrails and the audit log cannot be sidestepped. A write that tries to go around it is refused.
Atlas	Cross-source identity resolution. When two sources both reference the same real-world customer, vendor, or contact, Atlas links them so you get one canonical record instead of duplicates.
identity field	The normalized key Atlas matches on when it decides two records from two sources are the same real-world thing — an email address, a phone number, a tax ID.
audit log	The append-only record of privileged operations, guardrail decisions, and sign-in events in your instance — a tamper-evident history of what happened and who did it.
access token	A personal access token (PAT) you mint in the app to call your instance’s API from scripts, integrations, or the CLI. “PAT” for short.
MCP server	The endpoint that lets an AI client (Claude Code, Cursor, …) read your instance — your catalog, knowledge base, and data — under exactly the permissions you already have.
plan	Your pricing plan — the commitment level your organization is on.
billing	Your organization’s usage and invoices: what you owe and why.
usage	The metered activity — AI tokens, synced records — that rolls up into your billing.
sign in	Authenticating to the console or to your Turbobase app. (“Sign-in,” hyphenated, is the noun for the event.)
identity provider (SSO)	Your own sign-in system — Google Workspace, or any OIDC provider — wired to your instance so your team signs in with accounts they already have.
standalone	An instance where Turbobase is your system of record, with no upstream source connected — you create and own the data directly.
marketplace	Install a published hook or conduit into your instance with one command — or, if you’re an approved publisher, share your own for others to install.