Words used in this documentation

You do not need to read this page. It is here for the moment a word in another page stops you.

Words you meet while setting up

Waired app : The two things the installer puts on your computer: a background service that stays connected, and the waired command you type. You mostly interact with the Waired icon — in the menu bar on macOS, next to the clock on Windows and Linux.

Sign in / enroll : Signing in with Google adds this computer to your private network. Every computer signed in with the same Google account can reach the others.

Your network : The private, encrypted connection between your own computers. Nobody else can join it, and it is not reachable from the public internet.

Device : One computer in your network. Your desktop, your laptop and your work machine are three devices.

Administrator rights : Permission to change the whole computer rather than just your own account. Waired needs it once, to install a background service that starts with the computer. On macOS and Linux this is what sudo means; on Windows it is the blue “Do you want to allow this app to make changes?” window.

Words you meet around the AI itself

Model : The AI itself — a multi-gigabyte file of learned parameters. qwen3-coder-30b is a model. Bigger models give better answers and need more memory.

Inference : The act of producing an answer from a model. “Running inference on this computer” means the answer is computed here.

Inference engine : The program that loads a model into memory and runs it. Waired installs and manages Ollama for you.

Memory / VRAM : A model has to fit in memory to run. On a computer with a separate graphics card that means the card’s own memory (VRAM). On Apple Silicon and some AMD chips, memory is shared between the processor and graphics (“unified memory”), so the whole pool counts.

tok/s (tokens per second) : How fast answers come out. A token is roughly three-quarters of a word. Below about 15 tok/s a coding assistant starts to feel slow.

Context window : How much of the conversation the model can consider at once. Local models have smaller windows than cloud models, which is why long Claude Code sessions get summarized to fit — that is normal, and nothing is lost from the answer.

Words you meet when using it from another computer

Direct connection : Your two computers talking to each other straight across the internet, encrypted end to end. This is the normal case.

Relay : When a firewall or router blocks a direct connection, traffic goes through a Waired server instead. It is still encrypted end to end — the relay passes along sealed data it cannot read.

Sharing : Whether your other devices are allowed to use this computer’s AI. Turn it on for a desktop that should serve your laptop; leave it off to keep the AI to this machine.

Pausing : Temporarily stopping Waired from handling anything on this computer, without uninstalling or changing settings. waired resume undoes it.

Public share : An opt-in, separate feature that offers your AI to people outside your own account. Off by default. See Public share.

Words for the coding-agent setup

Coding agent : Claude Code, OpenCode, and similar tools that write and edit code for you.

Routing : Which AI answers a given request — your own computer, another of your computers, or the cloud provider. waired claude route shows and changes it.

Falling back : When your own AI cannot answer (still downloading, out of memory, computer asleep), Claude Code quietly uses the real Anthropic API instead so you are not blocked. Waired always tells you when this happened rather than hiding it.

Words you may see in error messages

Waired agent / daemon : The background service. “waired-agent is not running” means it stopped — restart it, or run waired doctor.

Gateway : The local address on your own computer (127.0.0.1:...) that coding agents send requests to. It never leaves your machine unless the answer has to come from another of your devices.

Coordination service : The Waired-run service that tells your devices how to find each other. It handles sign-in and device lists only — your prompts and answers never pass through it. See Privacy.