Reference
Glossary
Every term used in the AEF framework, defined in one place. If a concept page uses a word you don't recognize, it's here.
A
- Agent Team
- A group of agents assigned to a workflow phase, enabling cross-validation, specialization, and parallel execution.
- Agentic KPI
- A metric that measures the effectiveness of an agentic layer (streak length, average attempts, success rate, diff-to-plan ratio).
- Agentic Layer
- The configuration surface that developers build and maintain: prompt templates, tool integrations, quality gates, and workflow definitions.
- Artifact Chaining
- The mechanism by which each workflow phase's output is automatically loaded as input for the next phase via template variable substitution.
- ASE
- Autonomous Software Engineering. The practice of removing humans from the active development loop, replacing manual steps with AI-driven autonomous workflows.
C
- Classification Gate
- The innermost gate layer. Operates on structured phase output to categorize findings by severity (e.g., blocker, tech-debt, skippable). Rarely changes between autonomy levels. See Quality Gates.
D
- Deploy
- The sixth workflow phase. Produces a Pull Request or Change Request. Does not deploy to production.
- Disposition Gate
- The outermost gate layer. Determines whether a phase failure stops the workflow, triggers a warning, or requires human approval. Disposition gates are what change between autonomy levels. See Quality Gates.
E - F
- EARS (Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax)
- A lightweight requirements format using stimulus-response pairs. Format: "When [stimulus], the system shall [response]." Used in the Plan phase for feature user stories because it produces testable, unambiguous acceptance criteria.
- Enforcement Mechanism
- How permission boundaries are applied. Runtime enforcement restricts tool availability at the agent runtime level. Prompt-level enforcement uses template instructions. Both can be used together. See Tool Permissions.
- Escalation
- When a feedback loop exhausts its retry limit and surfaces the issue to a human with full context.
- Feedback Loop
- A self-healing cycle within the workflow where failures trigger automated remediation and re-validation.
G
- Gate Authority
- The degree of decision-making power granted to quality gates. At L1, gates are informational; at L4, gates have full authority over workflow flow. Gate authority is what changes between autonomy levels. See Autonomous Software Engineering.
- Gate Profile
- A set of disposition gate configurations that defines an autonomy level. Different profiles over the same workflow produce different autonomy behaviors. See Autonomous Software Engineering.
H
- Healing Gate
- The middle gate layer. Determines retry policy when a phase fails: how many attempts, what healing strategy, and when to stop (e.g., no progress detected). Wraps around phase execution. See Quality Gates.
I - M
- Intent
- An optional workflow phase that runs before Plan. Takes raw input of any quality and produces a well-structured intent specification through codebase research and interactive clarification. The only interactive phase in the workflow. See Intent Phase.
- Intent Specification (Intent Artifact)
- The structured output of the Intent phase containing: problem statement, issue type, user stories or reproduction steps, acceptance criteria, scope boundaries, and codebase context. Consumed by Plan via
${intent_artifact}. - Issue Type
- Classification of work items (Feature, Bug, Task, Patch) that determines workflow behavior. Can be determined by the Intent phase, a classification command, or provided directly by the user.
- Manifest
- A file-based state tracker (JSON) that records workflow progress and artifact locations.
- Meta-Prompt
- A prompt that generates another prompt rather than executing work directly.
- Monitor
- The seventh workflow phase. Tracks KPIs (success rates, iteration counts, cost, drift) and feeds production issues back to Plan, closing the outer feedback loop.
O - P
- Output Contract
- The structured format each workflow phase must produce as its artifact.
- Permission Boundary
- Phase-specific tool access restrictions that enforce least-privilege for agents.
- Workflow
- The end-to-end autonomous workflow: Plan, Build, Test, Review, Document, Deploy, Monitor.
- Prompt Template
- A structured instruction set that defines how an agent behaves within a given workflow phase.
Q - S
- Quality Gate
- Pass/fail criteria that must be satisfied before a workflow phase completes.
- Runner
- The abstraction layer between the workflow engine and AI model providers.
- Subagent
- A specialized agent spawned by a lead agent to handle a specific subtask.
T - W
- Template Variable
- A placeholder in a prompt template substituted with actual values at runtime.
- Worktree
- An isolated git working directory used to run a workflow instance.