Glossary

Agentic Debt: Debt that accrues when agent autonomy grows faster than architectural discipline. It surfaces in four forms: authority sprawl, contract gap, observability gap, and validation gap. The OCLS loop is the mechanism that pays it down systematically.
Agent: A responsible actor that calls modules and participates in collaboration flows in service of a goal. Not a function caller — a unit that owns and can explain an outcome.
Module: A reusable execution unit with declared input/output, authority, and failure conditions. The minimum governance unit an agent calls to fulfill its responsibility.
Contract: The bundle of interface and constraints an agent or module must honor. Includes input schema, output schema, required authority, failure conditions, and the shape of the failure response.
Governance: The operational control layer that manages quality, cost, authority, approval, and safety. Not a bolt-on afterthought — a baseline element of the architecture.
Responsibility Boundary: The boundary of an agent's owned responsibility. Decisions and execution inside the boundary are made by the agent alone; anything outside is delegated through an explicit handoff.
Handoff: The act of one agent explicitly delegating work that exceeds its responsibility to another agent. The scope and format of context passed at handoff must be defined.
Authority Scope: The range of actions an agent or module is permitted to execute. Covers read/write authority, callable external services, and cost ceilings.
Context: Structured information passed between agents at handoff. Includes conversation history, user intent, intermediate results, and metadata — filtered to what the receiving agent's responsibility requires.
State: Session-scope short-term data. Holds the current conversation, running temporaries, and progress markers, and is cleared automatically at session end.
Memory: System-scope long-term data. Holds learned patterns, customer preferences, and prior resolutions, and is promoted from short-term state by explicit criteria.
Evaluation Criteria: Quantitative measures of agent or module output quality. Covers success rate, response-quality score, cost efficiency, and hallucination detection.
Guardrail: A safety rule validated before agent execution. Constraints such as cost ceilings, authority scopes, action denylists, and PII blocks that stop risk before it materializes.
Escalation: The act of handing judgment to a higher-level agent or a human approver when the agent detects that the situation exceeds its autonomous scope. Escalation criteria must be defined explicitly.
Decision Traceability: The design principle of recording an agent's reasoning path, module-selection rationale, and handoff reasons in structured logs. Without traceability, evaluation, improvement, and audit are all impossible.
OCLS Loop: Own → Contract → Layer → Sharpen. The governance design loop of reopt architecture. Each cycle sharpens ownership, contracts, layering, and boundaries.
Own Every Outcome: The design principle that an owner assigned to every outcome makes responsibility explicit. With an owner, incidents trigger an immediate response and governance can operate.
Contract First: The design principle that declaring input, output, authority, and refusal conditions before implementation makes evaluation, replacement, and control possible. Contracts are provisional — operational data updates them.
Layer, Then Scale: The design principle that structuring agents into categories, layers, and boundaries preserves governance as agent count grows. Layering is the scaling strategy.
Sharpen in Operation: The design principle that adjusting boundaries from operational data lets governance evolve with reality.