AI & Agents
AI Agent
An AI agent is a software system that pursues a goal by taking actions, not just producing text.
Agentic AI
Agentic AI is the general term for AI systems that plan and act autonomously toward a goal rather than responding to one prompt at a time.
Multi-Agent System
A multi-agent system is an architecture where several specialised AI agents work on one goal, typically coordinated by a supervisor agent that decomposes the task, routes each part to the right specialist, and checks results before accepting them.
Tool Calling
Tool calling is the mechanism that lets a language model invoke external functions — querying a database, calling an API, sending an email.
RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)
RAG is a technique where an AI system retrieves relevant passages from your own documents at query time and generates an answer grounded in them, with citations.
Vector Database
A vector database stores text, images or other content as numerical embeddings and retrieves items by semantic similarity rather than exact keyword match.
Embedding
An embedding is a list of numbers representing the meaning of a piece of content, produced by a model so that semantically similar items sit close together in the resulting space.
MCP (Model Context Protocol)
MCP is an open standard for exposing tools and data to AI agents through a consistent interface.
Human-in-the-Loop (HITL)
Human-in-the-loop is a design pattern where an AI system pauses and requires a person to approve, modify or reject an action before it proceeds.
AI Guardrails
Guardrails are the constraints that limit what an AI system is permitted to do, enforced outside the model rather than requested inside a prompt.
Prompt Injection
Prompt injection is an attack where text placed in content the model reads — a document, a web page, an email, a tool response — is crafted to look like instructions, causing the system to act against its operator's intent.
Fine-Tuning
Fine-tuning adjusts a model's weights by training it on examples of desired behaviour, changing how it responds rather than what it knows.
Agent Orchestration
Agent orchestration is the layer that decides which AI agent handles which part of a task, in what order, and what happens when one fails.
Agent Evaluation
Agent evaluation is the practice of scoring an AI agent against a fixed set of real tasks with verified expected outcomes, so that every prompt change, model swap or tool update can be measured rather than guessed at.
Semantic Search
Semantic search finds results by meaning rather than by matching words, so a query about "reducing customer churn" can surface a document about "improving retention" even though they share no vocabulary.
Architecture & Engineering
Microservices
Microservices are an architecture where an application is split into small independent services, each owning one business capability and its own data, communicating over a network.
Monolithic Architecture
A monolithic architecture is an application built and deployed as a single unit, where all functionality shares one codebase, one process and usually one database.
API Gateway
An API gateway is a single entry point that sits in front of backend services and handles concerns common to all of them — authentication, rate limiting, routing, request validation and logging.
Serverless
Serverless is a model where code runs in short-lived instances the cloud provider creates on demand and destroys when idle, billed per invocation rather than per running server.
Containerization
Containerization packages an application together with its dependencies, libraries and configuration into a single image that runs identically on any machine with a container runtime.
Kubernetes
Kubernetes is a system that runs containers across a cluster of machines, deciding where each one should run, restarting them when they fail, scaling them with demand, and routing traffic between them.
CI/CD
CI/CD is the practice of automatically building and testing every code change (continuous integration) and automatically releasing changes that pass (continuous delivery or deployment).
Infrastructure as Code
Infrastructure as code means defining servers, networks, databases and permissions in version-controlled configuration files rather than configuring them by hand.
Blue-Green Deployment
Blue-green deployment runs two identical production environments, with only one serving live traffic.
Load Balancing
Load balancing distributes incoming requests across multiple servers so no single instance becomes a bottleneck, and so the failure of one instance does not take the service down.
Horizontal Scaling
Horizontal scaling adds more machines to handle load, rather than making one machine bigger.
Caching
Caching stores the result of an expensive operation so subsequent requests can reuse it instead of recomputing it.
Message Queue
A message queue holds tasks that one part of a system produces and another consumes later, decoupling the two so the producer does not wait for the work to finish.
Event-Driven Architecture
Event-driven architecture is a design where components publish events describing something that happened, and other components react to them, without the publisher knowing who is listening.
Multi-Tenancy
Multi-tenancy is an architecture where one running application serves many customer organisations, keeping each tenant's data isolated from the others.
SSO (Single Sign-On)
Single sign-on lets users authenticate once with a central identity provider and then access multiple applications without logging in again.
RBAC (Role-Based Access Control)
Role-based access control grants permissions to roles rather than to individuals, and assigns users to roles.
Webhooks
Webhooks are HTTP callbacks that one system sends to another when an event occurs, so the receiver learns about it immediately instead of polling for changes.
Rate Limiting
Rate limiting caps how many requests a client can make in a given period, protecting a service from being overwhelmed by a single caller — whether malicious, misconfigured or simply busy.
Technical Debt
Technical debt is the future cost created by choosing a faster implementation now over a better one.
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are a set of measurements Google uses to score real-world page experience: how quickly the main content renders, how fast the page responds to interaction, and how much the layout shifts while loading.