Concepts
The vocabulary, defined.
Plain definitions of the ideas this site runs on. Each links to where the idea is developed in depth.
Agentic Engineering
A delivery model in which AI agents work toward goals — planning, executing and checking with real tools — while humans set intent and govern acceptance.
AI-Native Organisation
The maturity stage where AI ways of working are the default operating model — strategy, data, governance and platforms re-engineered around them, not a programme bolted on.
Architecture Decision Record (ADR)
A short document capturing one significant decision — context, decision, consequences — held in source control and superseded, never edited.
Context Engineering
Curating the conventions, decisions, contracts and constraints an agent sees — the largest lever on whether agentic output is acceptable.
Decision Architecture
Treating architecture as the quality and velocity of decisions — classify by reversibility, decide via advice, capture as records that supersede rather than mutate.
Delivery Architecture
The discipline — owned by no one in most organisations — that translates business strategy into running outcomes across six handoffs.
Evals as Spec
Treating an executable evaluation suite as the real specification — a criterion two competent reviewers would agree on, made decidable before generation.
Governance-to-Value Ratio
A lens for settling whether a control earns its keep: the decision quality it adds versus the delay it imposes. Most controls never settle the wager.
Harness Architecture
The engineering around the model — scopes, context, and deterministic gates — that turns a capable model into acceptable output. The harness is the product.
Human Acceptance Loop
The supervised loop in which a human accepts or rejects agent-produced work at the points that matter — human-on-the-loop, not autopilot.
Intent Translation
Preserving intent as it moves from strategy through product, architecture, engineering and operations — and the place most of it quietly leaks away.
Provenance Engineering
Recording who decided what, when and on what evidence — an unbroken chain of custody for decisions in human-plus-agent systems.
The Acceptance Gap
The distance between what an agent generates and what a team will actually trust and ship. Once generation is cheap, this gap is where the work lives.
Vibe Coding
Generating code by prompting on instinct and accepting what looks plausible — fast, undisciplined, and the thing agentic engineering moves teams beyond.