The library — defined
Glossary.
The terms Aule uses, defined. The library is what lets the rest of the conversation be grounded — once a thing has a name, it can be observed, redistributed, and operated by someone other than the person whose head currently holds it. Linkable by anchor from any pillar page.
15 terms · Last updated 2026-05-19
Approval ladder
The rule-set a household pre-agrees to so the operating system can decide on its behalf without renegotiating each decision. Below threshold X, auto-approve; above threshold X, escalate to the named approver. The ladder is how Aule moves from a chore chart to a household that runs.
Charter Membership
Aule’s founding-cohort membership tier — application-based, white-glove onboarding, founding rate held for life. The Charter exists to define how AI lives at home with the first cohort of households that share that work with us.
Closed-loops household
A household in which every cognitive task that gets opened — a vendor needed, an appointment to schedule, a form to submit — gets explicitly closed. The number of open loops is the unit of cognitive load. Closed-loops households run lower than open-loops households at the same task volume.
Cognitive household labor
The peer-reviewed academic construct for the thinking work of running a home — anticipating, identifying, deciding, and monitoring. Sociologist Allison Daminger formalized the four-stage model in her 2019 paper in the American Sociological Review. Mothers in heterosexual partnerships carry approximately 71% of this load (Catalano Weeks, 2025).
Convicted Partner
The household member who has been carrying the cognitive load and who arrives at Aule already certain that the load is real, measurable, and worth moving. Aule’s primary intake archetype. The opposite of the unconvicted partner, who needs the load demonstrated to them — often by the Mental Load Index — before they will engage.
Default parent
The partner the school, the pediatrician, the camp registrar, and the family group chat all route to without asking. The default parent is a cultural-default phenomenon, not a capability one; the routing is set by who replied first the first time, and compounds from there. The Aule premise is that default-parent status is the visible artifact of an underlying unequal distribution of cognitive household labor.
Family operating system
The rules, calendars, vendors, decisions, routines, and accumulated household knowledge that keep a home running — treated as a first-class object, observable and ownership-transferable. Upstream of the chore chart and the family calendar. The artifact that cognitive household labor operates over.
Founding cohort
The first 250 households to hold Charter Membership in Aule. The cohort defines how AI lives at home — what gets automated, what stays human, what the operating-system layer looks like in practice. Founding-cohort feedback is the input loop that shapes the service for the next cohort.
Household COO
Internal shorthand for the role Aule plays for a household — the chief-operating-officer of the family operating system. Not a household manager (who executes the work the senior household member directs) and not a personal assistant (who handles one person’s schedule). The Household COO holds the operating layer, runs the approval ladder, and closes the loops.
Household intelligence
The category of service that operates a household’s family operating system on its behalf. The cognitive operating layer of a home, run as a managed service. Distinct from household management (executing work) and household automation (controlling devices).
Household memory (three layers)
Aule’s name for the three layers of institutional knowledge a household carries: the constants (preferred vendors, allergy lists, school routines), the active context (this week’s schedule, open loops, in-flight decisions), and the history (what was decided last year, what the pediatrician said two visits ago, which camp was a disaster). Household memory is the substrate the operating system operates on; without it the system has no fidelity.
Mental load
The popular term for cognitive household labor — the anticipating, planning, remembering, coordinating, and monitoring that runs a home. Entered mainstream awareness through French cartoonist Emma’s 2017 illustrated essay; formalized academically by Daminger (2019). Roughly 71% of it is carried by mothers in heterosexual partnerships; 75% of it is unnoticed by partners not carrying it.
The operating team
Aule’s framing for the human-plus-AI pair that runs each member household. The human partner holds judgment, escalation, and warm calls; the AI partner holds memory, anticipation, and pattern-matching. The team is the unit of service delivery — not the AI alone, not the human alone.
Presence agent
The Aule term for an AI agent designed to be experienced as present in a household rather than queried as a tool. A presence agent maintains continuous context, anticipates without being asked, and operates on household-specific memory. The distinction from a general-purpose assistant is that a presence agent is named, known, and contextual — it sounds like the household talking back, not like a chatbot.
The work before the work
Aule’s shorthand for the cognitive labor that precedes every visible household task — the anticipating, identifying, and deciding that has to happen before a chore can be performed. Most household-help services target the chores; Aule targets the work before the work.
The glossary is versioned alongside the rest of the Aule library. Terms are added as the work surfaces them; existing definitions are revised when the underlying research updates. To deep-link any entry, append the term's anchor — for example, #mental-load— to this page's URL.
Curated by Brennan McCloud, Founder, Aule. Last updated 2026-05-19.