Terminology

Term	Definition
Anvil Serving	Umbrella product, package, CLI, documentation site, and release line for six explicit local-AI product families.
Product family	One stable user outcome and authority boundary inside Anvil Serving. Every operational root command belongs to exactly one.
Model Serving	Family that owns artifacts, recipes, serve lifecycle, reservations, switching, and guarded promotion.
Capability meta-router	The Capability Gateway contract: a stable capability alias maps explicitly to one tier, while configured or inference-owned metadata describes the selected serve. It does not imply automatic model selection.
Capability Gateway	Family that implements the capability meta-router request path.
Evaluation & Evidence	Family that owns preflight, routed acceptance, benchmarks, and retained evidence without automatic promotion.
Anvil Voice	Family for STT, TTS, realtime proxy lifecycle, profiles, and voice qualification.
Anvil Media	Family for named image/video workflows, durable jobs, cancellation, qualification, and opaque artifacts.
Control Plane & Fleet	Family for topology, typed remote dispatch, host utilities, integrations, observability, and fleet state.
Thin capability gateway	The request-path implementation of the capability meta-router: token authentication, protocol translation, readiness, admission, streaming, and relay without an intent classifier or fallback chain.
Capability alias	A caller-facing model value declared in [router.model_routes], such as llm.primary or llm.voice.
Tier	A configured local backend endpoint selected by one capability alias.
Metadata authority	The owner of mutable served-model facts for a tier: router configuration in configured mode or the selected inference service in upstream mode.
Served configuration	The allowlisted model, context, engine, quantization, slot, modality, or build facts configured for or observed from one selected tier.
Purpose model	A named embedding or rerank model exposed through its dedicated API surface. Image, OCR, and video remain explicitly mapped chat capabilities; STT and TTS use audio routes.
Serve	A concrete model process managed and inspected with anvil-serving serves.
Preflight	Functional compatibility checks against one served model.
Benchmark	Repeatable performance or quality measurement recorded as evidence; it does not change routing automatically.
Transition	Quiesce, drain, or readmit an explicit local tier.

Use capability alias for a caller-facing model name and served model for the backend's advertised model id. Use benchmark evidence rather than profile or policy terminology. Use Anvil Serving for the umbrella and the exact family name when discussing one authority domain.