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Glossary

The AI Engineering Glossary

10 plain-English definitions of the terms that decide architectures, budgets, and roadmaps — written for people who ship. New terms land every week.

A

Agentic Loop

Agentic Loop is the iterative control cycle in which a large language model repeatedly observes state, reasons about what to do, executes an action such as a tool call,…

C

Context Rot

Context Rot is the progressive degradation of a language model's output quality as its context window accumulates stale, redundant, or mutually contradictory…

E

Eval Harness

An Eval Harness is the infrastructure that runs a model, prompt, or agent against a fixed set of test cases, collects the outputs, and scores each one with automated…

F

Function Calling

Function Calling is an API mechanism in which a language model, given a set of developer-declared function schemas, returns a structured JSON object naming one of those…

G

Guardrails

Guardrails are the input and output validation layers wrapped around a large language model that inspect, constrain, and sometimes block data flowing in or out before…

L

LLM-as-Judge

LLM-as-Judge is the practice of using a strong language model, prompted with a rubric, to score or compare the outputs of another model at scale, standing in for the…

M

Model Context Protocol (MCP)

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard, introduced by Anthropic in November 2024, that defines a uniform way for large language model applications to connect…

P

Prompt Injection

Prompt Injection is an attack in which text supplied through an LLM's input—a web page, email, document, or tool result—is interpreted by the model as instructions,…

R

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is an architecture that fetches relevant text from an external knowledge source at query time and inserts it into a language…

T

Tool Use

Tool Use is the capability by which a large language model produces a structured, machine-readable request to invoke an external function or API, receives the result,…

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