Plain terms.

Commerce has always written down what moved and what it cost. These are the words for the record it never kept, and the instruments that write it.

The third recordburq

Commerce keeps two records: the receipt, which says what moved, and the ledger, which says what it cost. Burq writes the third: why goods moved the way they did. Every other term on this page exists to write it well.

Decision Graphburq

Burq's proprietary record of how orders actually move, connected across the order, the customer, the options, the context, your systems, and the history: 1.4B facts weighed on orders, 122M alternatives compared, 162M decisions on the record. Every new decision is made against it, and every outcome deepens it.

Factburq

One attribute of one option on one order: a price, an ETA, a distance, a capacity, a provider's record in this zone at this hour. Every fact a decision weighs is kept, so the record can say not only what was chosen but what it was chosen on.

Decision Ledgerburq

Your operation's own written record. Every decision with its reasons, who decided, both calls wherever Burq shadowed your team, every override, promotion, demotion, and constraint version. An auditor can replay which rules governed which decisions on which day.

Graded decisionburq

A decision written with its evidence at the moment it was made: why it won, what it beat, what it knew, who decided. Graded on judgment, not hindsight, so a good call that met bad luck still reads as a good call.

Known, chosen, happenedburq

The three parts of every entry on the record: what Burq knew at the moment, what it chose and what it beat, and what happened. One line runs through them, and that line is the grade.

Sealedburq

Every entry is sealed the moment its decision commits, holding the facts exactly as Burq saw them. Later facts go into later entries. A grade is always against what was knowable, never against what happened next.

Alternatives weighedburq

Every eligible way to run an order, priced and scored before one wins. The losers, the runner-ups, are kept on the record with the reasons they lost. Options that would break your rules never score as wins.

The Decided Economyburq

An economy in which nothing moves on a guess: every order moves the best way it could, every decision is on the record, and every record makes the next one smarter. The second record made the modern economy possible. The third makes this one.

When AI leaves the chat window it spends real money and makes real promises. The field's words, plainly, and the engine Burq brings to it.

Physical-world AI

AI whose outputs move atoms: orders, vehicles, inventory, promises to real customers. Unlike a wrong sentence, a wrong decision here costs money and breaks a promise, so the standard of proof is higher than fluency.

Decisioning

Choosing among priced alternatives under real constraints: which provider, which vehicle, which window, at what cost, against which promise. The hard part of physical-world AI, and the part that deserves a record.

Orchestration

Moving work between systems along a defined flow. Necessary plumbing, frequently sold as intelligence. Orchestration executes decisions; it does not make them, and it leaves no account of why.

Telemetry

What happened to an order: completed, on time, how long, how late. Every dashboard in the category reports it, and Burq includes it. The record adds what was known, what was weighed, who decided, and whether the call was right.

Agentic AI

The industry's word for software that pursues objectives across multiple steps and tools. The word describes effort, not trustworthiness: nothing about being agentic makes a system's decisions inspectable, and inspectability is what earns authority.

Human-in-the-loop

A human confirms decisions before they execute. Often used as a permanent disclaimer; better used as a stage. In Burq it is Review mode: one mode on a ladder, with a threshold for moving past it and a record either way.

Shadow deployment

The engineering practice of running a new system beside the incumbent with no authority, comparing outputs before any switch. Standard discipline in aviation and machine learning. Burq's Shadow mode is this practice made a product, per segment, on your live orders.

Auditability

The property that a system's decisions can be replayed afterward: what it chose, what it beat, what it knew, and which rules governed. A record written at decision time, not a report assembled after the fact.

Ground truth

What actually happened, as recorded: the order arrived in its window or it did not, the promise held or it broke. The only honest grader of a decision, and the reason grading must separate judgment from luck.

Counterfactual

The path not taken, kept with its price and its reason. Most systems discard theirs the moment a choice is made. Burq preserves them as alternatives weighed, which is what makes a decision arguable later.

Quote

What a provider says it will charge and what it says will happen: a price, a window, sometimes an ETA. The right interface for what it carries, and silent on whether the provider will take the job at this hour, how its window holds under load, or what the alternative cost the last time. Burq corrects every quote against the record before it competes.

Burq Intelligenceburq

The engine that reads orders, weighs alternatives, and makes graded decisions against the Decision Graph. It is the same engine in every mode; what changes between modes is authority, not care.

Promise

The commitment made to a customer at checkout: the window, the price, the handling. Burq decides promise-first, and a policy that would break promises cannot be saved.

Shadow runburq

A period in which Burq Intelligence decides beside your team on live orders with zero authority, its call written next to yours, order for order. The delta between the two records is the case for granting more.

Matchburq

The measure of agreement between Burq's call and your team's: how often the two come out the same on the same order, counted only where both decided under the same constraints. Two calls can differ by name and match in effect: the same promise held, a price inside your tolerance. Every divergence is priced, with its reason.

Productive disagreementburq

A divergence between Burq's call and your team's where, with both paths graded on what was knowable, the grade favors Burq's call. Matching your team is how Burq earns authority. Productive disagreement is why granting it was worth anything.

Self-QAburq

Burq grades its own work. Every closed order is revisited with hindsight: was the winner the best call on the board? A better call that existed is written down with its dollar figure. Your team's wins are written in your favor.

Decision qualityburq

One call graded on several dimensions, not one score: what it cost, whether the promise held, how reliable the provider was, how fast it arrived, how the customer experienced it. A cheap decision that broke a promise is not a good decision.

Baselineburq

What the same orders would have cost the way you used to dispatch them. Every saving on the statement is measured against it, order by order.

Statementburq

Savings realized against your baseline, itemized by reason and by order, exportable any time. What reconciliation recovers from provider invoices lands on it too.

Replay

Past orders run through Burq Intelligence to see what it would have chosen: a drafted rule against your last 30 days, a fleet change on paper before you commit. Replay orients. It does not grant authority, because history cannot say what the road not taken would have done. Authority is earned on live orders.

agents

Lowercase on purpose. Short-lived workers Burq Intelligence spawns per job to carry a decision out, then retires. Plumbing, never the product. Burq does not sell agents; it sells decisions you can read.

The words for how software comes to act on its own in the physical world, and how it should.

Autonomy

Software acting without a human confirming each action. In the physical world, autonomy spends money and makes promises in your name, which is why it is a state to be reached on evidence, not a feature to be switched on.

Earned autonomyburq

Burq's doctrine for granting authority: none on day one, climbed segment by segment on thresholds you can read, and revocable the moment a hard rule breaks. Autonomy here is not a promise; it is a state your operation reaches on evidence.

Granted autonomy

The category default Burq rejects: full authority on day one, on the strength of a demo and a promise, audited later if ever. The proof is someone else's benchmark. Earned autonomy exists because this asks for faith.

The ladderburq

The four modes in order: Manual, Shadow, Review, Autonomous. Every mode earns the next, promotion waits for your sign-off, and the ladder runs both ways.

Modeburq

One of the four positions on the ladder: Manual, Shadow, Review, Autonomous. The mode is written into every entry, so accountability is never reconstructed after the fact. On this site, mode means authority. The ways an order can travel go by their names.

Manual modeburq

Your team decides; Burq records. Every dispatch is written to the Decision Ledger with the pick, the price, the runner-ups, and the reasons. The record starts on day one.

◐ Shadow modeburq

Burq decides beside your team with no authority to act. Its call is written next to yours on every order. Agreement is evidence; divergence is priced, with the reason. Marked everywhere by the half-moon.

Review modeburq

Burq proposes; your team approves. One tap accepts, one overrides, and both are recorded with reasons. Every override teaches the next decision, so the same disagreement gets rarer.

Autonomous modeburq

Burq executes inside your policies: caps, windows, provider constraints. Anything outside policy comes straight back to your team, and every dispatch is still written to the ledger. Held only while the record stays clean.

Thresholdburq

The evidence a segment must show before it moves up: matching your team's calls over enough decisions in Shadow, sustained acceptance over weeks in Review, zero hard-rule breaches to hold Autonomous. Thresholds can be tightened, never skipped.

Readinessburq

Where a segment stands against its threshold, shown on the board as one of five states: too early, building, ready to promote, holding, auto-demoted.

The boardburq

Every segment, its mode, its record, its threshold, and its readiness, on one screen. Promotion is offered here when the record clears the bar. Demotion has already happened by the time you read it. The state of trust between you and Burq, at a glance.

Sign-offburq

The human decision that promotes a segment. When a threshold is cleared, Burq marks the segment ready, states the evidence, and waits. Promotion is offered, never seized.

Auto-demotionburq

The one change of authority Burq makes alone, and the circuit breaker on the ladder. A segment that breaches a hard rule loses its mode immediately, with the evidence attached to the demotion in the ledger. Demotion does not wait for a meeting.

Evidence clockburq

Every segment's record starts at zero, including segments created by a constraint change in a trusted operation. Authority is never inherited; it is earned in place.

Accept rateburq

In Review, the share of Burq's proposals your team accepts. One metric across modes, held over weeks rather than spiked, and it feeds promotion. Accepted proposals are audited against outcomes just as overrides are, because a reviewer who stops reviewing scores high too.

Autonomous shareburq

The share of your decisions made in Autonomous mode. It rises only as segments clear their thresholds and you sign off, and it falls the moment a segment is demoted.

Confidenceburq

How sure Burq is of a call, carried on the record. Low confidence or high impact hands the decision to a person with the ledger attached, and the restraint is recorded too. Burq never pushes through uncertainty.

The words for the moving parts: what gets decided, what does the moving, and the rules the decisions live inside.

Order

The unit Burq decides about: an item, a place it must reach, and a promise attached. Burq says order, not delivery, because the decision starts before anything moves.

Checkout

The moment a customer commits to an order and the promise is written: the window, the price, the handling. In-Store Checkout is the Burq product that puts it at your counter: a customer scans a QR code and Burq takes it from there.

Dispatch

The unit Burq plans, prices, runs, and records: a single order, a multi-stop route, or a handoff to parcel. Orders are what your customers place. Dispatches are how they move.

Segmentburq

A part of your operation that behaves like one thing: local orders under 10 miles from one store, big and bulky across all stores, parcel on 2-day promises. Burq Intelligence draws the map from your live orders; you can rename, split, merge, or add your own. Each segment carries its own policy, its own record, and its own mode on the ladder.

Policyburq

A segment's standing rules: when to dispatch (immediately, at window open, on a daily batch, at cutoff), and its escape rules. Policies are validated against your live orders as you write them, and a policy that would break promises cannot be saved.

Escape ruleburq

A condition that takes an order out of its segment's normal path: a promise under 36 hours upgrades to a driver, an order over a value cap is held for your team. Exceptions, written down in advance.

Hard ruleburq

A constraint that can never be broken: one frozen order per route, no mixed-merchant refrigerated runs, no dropoffs after dock hours. Breaching one auto-demotes the segment on the spot.

Constraint modelburq

Your operation's rules as Burq holds them, written as sentences, visible, and versioned to the Decision Ledger, whether they arrived from settings or a dispatcher's note. An auditor can see which version governed which decision.

Guardrailsburq

The live boundaries on Autonomous mode: caps, windows, and provider constraints an autonomous dispatch must clear before it runs. Step outside them and the order returns to your team.

Commitments

The terms in your provider agreements: first-refusal rights, weekly minimums, volume splits, fee ceilings. Burq holds them as constraints and applies them before price. When a commitment decides an order, the record says so and shows what it cost.

Rule editburq

A change Burq drafts from the record when a pattern surfaces: in plain words, with the evidence attached and your recent orders replayed to show the effect. You accept, dismiss, or open the evidence. Nothing changes until you do.

Re-routeburq

A decision re-made while an order is in flight, held to the same grading as the original: why the new call won, what it beat, what it knew when conditions changed. Always hyphenated.

Decline

A provider turning down a job it quoted, or releasing one it accepted. Each decline is graded to that provider's record for the zone and the hour, and the order moves to its fallback while the promise is still keepable.

Fallback

The runner-up, already priced when the dispatch committed. When a provider declines or runs late, the fallback exists before it is needed: re-quoted live and re-routed, with the failure graded to whoever caused it.

Batching

Several orders on one dispatch, when the detour, dwell time, and capacity actually fit. A shared run is priced with real stop counts and dwell minutes and wins only when it saves. The singles it beat stay on the record.

Origin

Where an order ships from. When it could fulfill from several stores or a DC, every origin enters the decision priced from there and promised from there. Your OMS still makes the call. The record shows what the other origin would have cost.

Zone, lane, hour

The grain the record keeps performance at: the zone an order runs in, the lane it travels, the hour it moves, the weather it moves in. A provider that is excellent at noon downtown can be the wrong call at 5 pm in the rain. The record keeps them apart.

Exception

An order that needs something: a stall, a decline, a missing proof, a customer asking where it is. An agent spawns for it. What an agent cannot close hands off to a person with the ledger attached, and your team meets only the ones where the decision is theirs.

Reconciliation

Every provider charge matched to its quote and its outcome. Billed above quote is credited, a fee charged twice is reversed, late against the promise is claimed. What comes back lands on the statement.

An order's life from a container to a customer's door, in plain words.

Port to doorstep

The whole journey of goods: off a ship, through freight and warehouses, onto smaller and smaller vehicles, to a customer's door.

Handoff

The point where an order changes hands: port to truck, truck to warehouse, warehouse to driver. Each party decides its own leg, and the why rarely survives the handoff. The third record follows the order, not the leg.

Drayage

The short haul that moves a container off a port or rail yard to a nearby warehouse. The first movement goods make on land.

Freight

Goods moved in bulk before they are anybody's order: containers, pallets, truckloads. Priced by space, weight, and distance rather than by promise.

FTL, full truckload

One shipper's goods filling an entire truck, plant or port to warehouse, priced by the truck. The cheapest way to move a lot of one thing.

LTL, less than truckload

Pallets from several shippers sharing one truck, priced by the space and weight each takes. How most big and bulky goods cross the middle of the journey.

Linehaul

The scheduled long haul between a network's hubs. It moves volume, not orders: no single order is decided there, but every order rides it.

Middle mile

Movement between a company's own facilities: distribution center to store, warehouse to fulfillment site. Scheduled, repeated, and invisible to the customer.

Cross-dock

A facility where goods move straight from inbound trucks to outbound ones with little or no storage. Sorting in motion.

Distribution center

The warehouse where bulk becomes orders: goods arrive as pallets and leave as promises to individual customers.

First mile

The pickup: the movement from a seller's shelf or dock into whatever network will carry the order onward.

The doorstep legburq

The final movement to the customer, the stretch where the promise is kept or broken. The industry names this leg by the mile; Burq names it by the customer, because the customer does not think in miles.

Ship from store

Filling an order from a store's shelves instead of a distant warehouse, turning every location into a small fulfillment site. Shorter distances, tighter windows, and inventory that was already near the customer.

Returns

The doorstep leg run in reverse: an order moving from the customer back to a store or warehouse. The same decision, provider, price, window, made backward, and just as worth a record.

Delivery window

The span of hours an order is promised to arrive within. Narrower windows cost more and forgive less, which is why the window is part of every graded decision.

Proof of delivery

The evidence an order arrived as promised: a photo, a signature, a timestamp. The last entry in an order's record, and the ground truth its decision is graded against.

Every way an order can travel the doorstep leg, and the words for who moves it.

Provider

Any way an order can move: a driver network, a parcel network, your own fleet. Burq owns no drivers and no vehicles, so the decision between providers is graded on your outcome and nothing else.

Service level

What the customer bought and the promise it carries: on-demand in minutes, same-day, scheduled to a window, parcel in one to five days. A provider may offer several. Each is quoted as its own option and graded on its own record.

Driverburq

The person who moves an order, on a network that puts thousands behind one integration or on your own payroll. On a network, priced per job and quoted in minutes.

In-house fleet

Vehicles and drivers your operation employs directly. Predictable cost, finite capacity, and the first place a good decision looks when a route is already paid for.

Build vs buyburq

Your fleet against the network, answered on every order instead of once a year. Your drivers are priced at true cost: the vehicle, the capacity consumed, the time on route, the shift a run would overrun. Idle hours fill first, the network takes what your fleet cannot, and the record shows which was right, order by order.

Parcel

Boxed goods moving through a national sorting network on 1-to-5-day promises, priced by size, weight, and zone. Batched daily at a cutoff rather than dispatched per order, which makes the cutoff itself a decision.

3PL, third-party logistics

A company that runs warehousing, fulfillment, or shipping on a brand's behalf. The brand keeps the customer; the 3PL keeps the shelves.

White glove

Delivery with service attached: a scheduled window, two people, inside placement, assembly, debris taken away. Sold on care, graded on it too.

Big and bulky

Orders too large for parcel: furniture, appliances, equipment. Two-person crews, scheduled windows, and the segment where a wrong decision costs the most.

Hybrid fleet

An operation that mixes its own vehicles with outside providers, choosing per order. The mix is itself a decision, made hundreds of times a day, which is why it deserves a record.

Reliability scoreburq

Every quote graded against what the provider actually did, by zone, hour, and package type, rolled up into one score for the region an order runs in. Your own fleet is scored in the same table. The score decides who gets your next order.