# Agentic Glossary — Quick Reference

> 88 essential agentic-AI terms with primary-source citations. Maintained by AgentsBooks (https://agentsbooks.com).

## Pages
- /index.md — full glossary as markdown
- /pages/methodology.md — sourcing methodology + bibliography
- /pages/about.md — purpose, audience, framing

## What this site is
Quick-reference glossary of agentic-AI vocabulary. 88 terms across 9 categories, each defined in 1–3 sentences with one canonical primary-source citation. Optimized for fast lookup and LLM citation. Companion to the deep Agentic Glossary at https://agentic-glossary.roei-020.workers.dev/.

## Authority
Cites 37 canonical primary sources including: Anthropic (Building Effective Agents, MCP, Constitutional AI, Many-shot jailbreaking, Sleeper Agents), Google (A2A protocol), MCP Specification, A2A Protocol Specification, NIST (AI RMF, GenAI Profile), European Commission (EU AI Act), ISO (42001), Vaswani et al. (Transformer), Lewis et al. (RAG), Wei et al. (CoT), Yao et al. (ReAct, ToT), Schick et al. (Toolformer), Park et al. (Generative Agents), Shinn et al. (Reflexion), Gartner, McKinsey, Gary Marcus, AgentsBooks. Last refreshed 2026-05-07.

## Term index

### 8 Primitives (8)
- Identity (primitive) — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#identity
- Brain (primitive) — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#brain
- Heart (primitive) — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#heart
- Memory (primitive) — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#memory-primitive
- Control (primitive) — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#control
- Knowledge (primitive) — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#knowledge
- Friends (primitive) — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#friends
- Shares (primitive) — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#shares

### Core Concepts (14)
- Agent — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#agent
- Agentic AI — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#agentic-ai
- Agentic firm — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#agentic-firm
- Agent fleet — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#agent-fleet
- Workflow (vs agent) — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#workflow
- Tool use / Function calling — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#tool-use
- Autonomy — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#autonomy
- Multi-agent system — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#multi-agent
- AI assistant — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#ai-assistant
- Chatbot — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#chatbot
- Copilot — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#copilot
- Generative AI — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#generative-ai
- Large Language Model (LLM) — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#llm
- Transformer — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#transformer

### Protocols (11)
- MCP / Model Context Protocol — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#mcp
- MCP Tools — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#mcp-tools
- MCP Resources — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#mcp-resources
- MCP Prompts — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#mcp-prompts
- MCP Sampling — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#mcp-sampling
- A2A / Agent2Agent Protocol — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#a2a
- Agent Card (A2A) — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#agent-card
- A2A Task — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#a2a-task
- A2A Artifact — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#a2a-artifact
- OpenAI Assistants API — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#openai-assistants-api
- OpenAI Responses API — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#openai-responses-api

### Memory & RAG (11)
- RAG / Retrieval-Augmented Generation — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#rag
- Vector database — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#vector-database
- Embedding — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#embedding
- Chunking — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#chunking
- Semantic search — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#semantic-search
- Hybrid search — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#hybrid-search
- Context window — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#context-window
- Context graph — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#context-graph
- Long-term memory — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#long-term-memory
- Episodic memory — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#episodic-memory
- Semantic memory — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#semantic-memory

### Reasoning (8)
- Chain-of-Thought (CoT) — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#chain-of-thought
- ReAct — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#react
- Tree of Thoughts (ToT) — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#tree-of-thoughts
- Reflexion — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#reflexion
- Self-consistency — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#self-consistency
- Toolformer — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#toolformer
- Plan-and-execute — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#plan-and-execute
- Routing — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#routing

### Frameworks (6)
- LangGraph — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#langgraph
- CrewAI — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#crewai
- AutoGen — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#autogen
- LangChain — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#langchain
- LlamaIndex — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#llamaindex
- Pydantic AI — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#pydantic-ai

### Evaluation (11)
- Eval — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#eval
- Benchmark — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#benchmark
- HumanEval — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#humaneval
- SWE-bench — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#swe-bench
- GAIA — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#gaia
- LLM-as-judge — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#llm-as-judge
- Hallucination — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#hallucination
- Reliability gap — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#reliability-gap
- Observability — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#observability
- Trace — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#trace
- Span — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#span

### Compliance (14)
- AI RMF (NIST) — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#ai-rmf
- GenAI Profile (NIST AI 600-1) — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#genai-profile
- High-risk AI system (EU AI Act) — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#high-risk-ai
- GPAI (General-purpose AI) — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#gpai
- AI literacy (EU AI Act Art. 4) — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#ai-literacy
- AI Agent Interoperability Profile (NIST) — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#agent-interoperability-profile
- ISO/IEC 42001 — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#iso-42001
- Trustworthy AI — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#trustworthy-ai
- Constitutional AI (CAI) — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#constitutional-ai
- Red-teaming — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#red-teaming
- Many-shot jailbreaking — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#many-shot-jailbreak
- Prompt injection — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#prompt-injection
- Sleeper agent — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#sleeper-agent
- Sandboxing — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#sandboxing

### Operations (5)
- ADLC (Agent Development Life Cycle) — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#adlc
- AX (Agent Experience) — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#ax
- Agent management platform — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#agent-management-platform
- Guardrail — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#guardrail
- Human-in-the-loop (HITL) — https://agentic-glossary-quickref.roei-020.workers.dev/#human-in-the-loop

## See also
- Deep Agentic Glossary: https://agentic-glossary.roei-020.workers.dev/
- AgentsBooks pillar (8 Primitives): https://agentsbooks.com/blog/eight-primitives-agentic-firm
- AgentsBooks Anatomy of a Firm: https://agentsbooks.com/anatomy
- Try AgentsBooks: https://agentsbooks.com/login?returnTo=/onboarding