Key Concepts

Before diving into Calvin, it helps to understand the key concepts that make up the platform. These terms appear throughout the documentation and the product itself.

Store

A Store is your organization's top-level account in Calvin. It contains all your workspaces, agents, team members, billing, and settings. Think of it as your company's Calvin instance.

Workspace

A Workspace is a self-contained development environment where Calvin's agents do their work. Each workspace is tied to a specific technology stack (e.g., Node.js/Next.js, VTEX IO, Magento, Shopify) and comes pre-configured with the right agents for that stack. Workspaces include a code editor, file explorer, browser preview, version control, and a chat interface where you interact with agents.

Agents

Agents are the AI copilots that execute tasks inside workspaces. Calvin comes with built-in agents specialized in different roles (Full Stack Developer, Analyst, UI/UX Specialist, Web QA Specialist, and others), each belonging to a team and assigned a seniority level. You can also create Custom Agents with their own knowledge base for specialized workflows.

Knowledge

Knowledge represents the information and context that agents use to make decisions, generate content, and execute tasks effectively. It can include documentation, style guides, FAQs, business rules, or any other structured or unstructured data relevant to the Store or Workspace.

Chat

A Chat is a single task session within a workspace. You create a chat by describing what you want Calvin to do, and the agent creates a plan, executes it step by step, and delivers the result. Each chat operates on its own Git branch and produces a worklog of everything that was done. Chats have lifecycle statuses: Working, Completed, or Discarded.

Blocks

Blocks are infrastructure components and knowledge packs you can add to a workspace. Building Blocks provide services like databases, AI SDKs, error tracking, image processing, and object storage. Skills are community-contributed knowledge packs (like React best practices or TypeScript patterns) that enhance how agents work within a specific technology.

Connectors

Connectors are MCP (Model Context Protocol) integrations that extend a workspace's capabilities by connecting it to external services and tools.

Tips

Tips are curated knowledge entries that guide how agents behave. You can create tips manually to teach Calvin your team's preferences, coding standards, or workflow patterns. Tips can be targeted to specific workspaces or workspace types.

Memory

Memory is Calvin's automatic learning system. When a chat is completed, Calvin extracts learnings from the session and proposes them as memories. You confirm which memories to keep, and Calvin applies them to future tasks — getting smarter with every interaction.

Artifacts

Artifacts are outputs generated by workspaces (such as code components, reports, or design assets) that can be shared across your team. They can be public, private, or shared with specific team members.

Builder & Runtime

Builder and Runtime are the two cost dimensions in Calvin. Builder credits are consumed when agents are actively working on tasks (the AI execution time). Runtime credits are consumed by deployed applications and their infrastructure — compute, databases, storage, and other resources running on Calvin's hosting.