Concepts
A flow is a direct-style TypeScript program that orchestrates coding-agent work through Orca runtime primitives. Prefer “flow” over pipeline, job, or command suite.
Flow context
Section titled “Flow context”The flow context is the ambient runtime scope that provides filesystem, git, GitHub, terminal, command, LLM, plan, and review capabilities.
Conversation
Section titled “Conversation”A conversation is the normalized event stream and final outcome produced by a backend adapter. Backend-specific transport details stay behind that adapter.
Backend adapter
Section titled “Backend adapter”A backend adapter maps a coding-agent CLI or service into the shared conversation model. The supported live backend constructors are claude(), codex(), opencode(), and pi().
Persistent plan
Section titled “Persistent plan”A persistent plan is a replayable plan artifact stored under .orca/plan-<hash>.md. It lets long-running task flows recover progress after an interruption.
A loop is a flow that repeats a cycle until a measurable state says the work is done. Loops use presets such as untilGatesGreen(), untilManifestComplete(), untilNoIssues(), untilConfident(threshold), and times(n).
Loop module
Section titled “Loop module”A loop module is an import-safe file under .orca/loops/ that exports defineLoop({ name, source, sink, onTrigger }). Orca can list, run, or serve it without treating it as a self-executing script.