Edition 2026.08 · Reviewed 2026-08-09
Agentic Engineering Dictionary
A searchable, source-disciplined dictionary of agentic engineering concepts, technical terms, mechanisms, failure modes, and implementation decisions.
Agentic engineering
The discipline of designing intent, context, memory, tools, execution, verification, control, and evidence so goal-directed agents can perform meaningful work while humans remain accountable.
Intent engineering
The practice of turning goals into versioned specifications, constraints, interfaces, invariants, decision rights, acceptance criteria, and testable outcomes before agents implement them.
Context engineering
The deliberate selection and maintenance of instructions, knowledge, tools, state, examples, and artifacts within a finite model attention budget.
Durable project memory
Persistent, attributable project knowledge that carries decisions, outcomes, requirements, failures, and operating state across agent sessions without assuming that every stored item remains true or safe.
Harness engineering
Engineering the agent loop, task decomposition, tools, permissions, session state, checks, retries, feedback, checkpoints, and stop conditions that surround a model.
Tools, skills & protocols
The action and knowledge interfaces through which agents use tools, load procedural skills, access enterprise context, and collaborate with other agents.
Agent execution substrate
The isolated, stateful environment in which agents observe and act, including compute, filesystem, browser, network, credentials, resource limits, and session lifecycle.
Agent identity & delegated authority
The identity and authorization discipline that treats an enterprise agent as a non-human principal with attributable, purpose-bound, time-bound permissions.
Independent verifier systems
A separation-of-judgment architecture in which builder agents, evaluator agents, deterministic checks, domain experts, and authorization authorities challenge different failure surfaces.
Eval-driven development
An engineering loop that converts expected behavior and observed failures into repeatable evaluations combining deterministic checks, environment inspection, security testing, model graders, repeated trials, and human judgment.
Observability & control
The combined telemetry and enforcement architecture for tracing agent behavior, evaluating policy, obtaining approval, constraining action, revoking authority, quarantining execution, and stopping systems.
Evidence engineering
The design of versioned, queryable evidence linking requirements, decisions, implementations, tests, evaluations, approvals, deployments, runtime signals, and lifecycle actions.
Human accountability
The operating discipline that assigns a named human role authority and answerability for an agent’s purpose, risk, decision rights, authorization, intervention, outcomes, and lifecycle.
Risk-tiered autonomy
The practice of classifying an agent by impact, data sensitivity, action scope, and reversibility, then binding that tier to maximum autonomy, required controls, approval authorities, and monitoring depth.
Deterministic containment
The enforcement envelope outside the model: isolation, deny-by-default access, typed allowlists, quotas, transaction ceilings, network boundaries, timeouts, rollback, quarantine, and tested stop controls.
Runtime policy enforcement
The pre-action decision and enforcement layer that evaluates identity, purpose, risk tier, tool, resource, data class, limits, approval state, and current evidence before allowing an agent action.
Agent estate governance
Portfolio governance for discovering and registering every enterprise agent with its identity, sponsor, owner, purpose, risk tier, platform, models, tools, data, dependencies, status, value, and exceptions.
Continuous recertification & retirement
Scheduled and event-driven reassessment that renews, restricts, transfers, suspends, or ends an agent’s authority—and verifiably revokes its identities, credentials, tools, dependencies, and retained data at retirement.
Instruction–data trust boundary
An architecture that distinguishes authoritative instructions from retrieved content, memory, tool results, and external data through provenance, trust labels, privilege separation, validation, and mediated action.
Agent incident response
An agent-specific response discipline that detects unsafe behavior, contains execution, revokes authority, preserves evidence, reconciles external effects, involves accountable owners, restores safely, and converts incidents into controls and evaluations.