Glossary
Anton's internals are organized around a brain-inspired architecture, and the source code and developer guide use neuroscience names for its parts. The user docs deliberately don't. This page is the bridge: if you're crossing from the user docs into the code or developer guide, here's what each plain name is called on the other side.
| In the user docs | In the code & developer guide | One-line meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Memory (as a whole) | Engrams, stored via the hippocampus and coordinated by the cortex (hippocampus.py, cortex.py) | Each saved entry is an "engram" — a single memory trace; the hippocampus reads/writes them and the cortex decides what to load. See Memory systems |
| Identity / profile | profile.md — the Default Mode Network analog | Always-on facts about you that contextualize everything Anton does. See Brain mapping |
| Rules | rules.md — basal-ganglia-style go/no-go gates | "Always" enables, "never" suppresses, "when" handles conditions. See Brain mapping |
| Lessons | lessons.md — semantic memory (anterior temporal lobe analog) | Facts distilled from experience into general knowledge. See Memory systems |
| Topics | topics/*.md — cortical association areas analog | Per-subject knowledge loaded on demand, not in every prompt. See Memory systems |
| Skills | Procedural memory — the striatum analog (skills.py) | Reusable procedures retrieved on demand via the recall_skill tool. See Skills internals |
| Episodes | Episodic memory — medial temporal lobe analog (episodes.py) | The raw, timestamped session archive searched by the recall tool. See Memory systems |
| Background error learning | Cerebellum (cerebellum.py) and anterior cingulate cortex / ACC (acc.py) | The cerebellum learns from individual failed code cells; the ACC spots error patterns across a whole turn. See Cerebellum and ACC |
| Session review (learning from finished work) | Consolidation — sleep-replay analog (consolidator.py) | After a work session, a background pass replays it and extracts durable rules and lessons. See Memory systems |
Memory cleanup / /memory vacuum | Compaction — synaptic homeostasis analog | Deduplicates and merges memory entries when files grow too large. See Memory systems |
| Memory modes (autopilot / copilot / off) | The encoding gate — locus coeruleus analog | Controls how aggressively new memories get written, and which need your confirmation. See Memory systems |
| Scratchpad | Working-memory execution environment | The isolated environment where Anton writes and runs code, one venv per scratchpad. See Scratchpad runtime |
| Legacy migration (old learnings → memory) | Reconsolidation (reconsolidator.py) | One-time, automatic re-encoding of old memory formats into the current schema. See Memory systems |
For the full table of brain regions and their modules, see Brain mapping.