| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Step | One pass of the agent loop: context assembly → reasoning → action/tool → observation |
| Trajectory | The ordered sequence of steps for one task; the unit of replay and evaluation |
| Determinism boundary | The deliberate line between generative reasoning (selection, judgment) and deterministic code (execution, verification) |
| Context budget | The allocation policy for the context window across system core, task frame, retrieved knowledge, and working set |
| Compaction | Agent-written summarization of its own trajectory with pointers back to evidence, to control context growth auditably |
| Golden set | A versioned corpus of replayable evaluation scenarios harvested from real incidents, with known answers and oracles |
| State-based oracle | A success check that probes actual system state rather than symptoms (e.g., defect present?) — resistant to alert-clearing false wins |
| Reward hacking | An agent satisfying the measured objective while defeating its intent (e.g., disabling the fault injector, restart-looping alerts clear) |
| Diagnosis–mitigation gap | The measured drop-off between correctly identifying a root cause and safely fixing it; the two are scored separately |
| Indirect prompt injection | Adversarial instructions planted in content the agent reads (logs, tickets, tool metadata) rather than sent to it directly |
| Confused deputy | An authorized agent misled into using its legitimate credentials for an attacker’s goal |
| Taint tagging | Provenance labels on context elements (system / human / telemetry / third-party) enforced through prompting and structure |
| Promotion (seam) | The sensing engine’s decision to wake the resolver engine for an event; its rate drives fleet economics |
| Bundle | The versioned deployable unit of an agent system: prompts, tools, skills, policy, retrieval config, model pins |
| Judge | A model scoring agent outputs against a rubric; requires calibration against human grades |
| Evidence integrity | The evaluation requirement that every claim in a conclusion traces to data the agent actually retrieved |
| Kill switch | A single drilled action halting all autonomous execution fleet-wide while investigation continues |
Agentic Infrastructure Operations - Engineer Edition
Appendix C · Glossary — Engineer Delta
Engineering terms that extend the Field Guide glossary — from steps and trajectories to taint tagging and kill switches.
Extends the Field Guide glossary; terms there are not repeated here.