> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.cloudthinker.io/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# 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.*

| 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                                        |