The vocabulary every engineering team needs before shipping agents to production. Nine visual vocabulary cards: Agentic Loops, MCP, Subagents, AI Gateway, Inference Economics, Evals, Guardrails, Observability, and The Bitter Lesson.
01
Pattern · Control Flow
Agentic Loops
Plan → act → observe → reflect — repeated until a goal is met. The base unit of agentic behaviour.
Plan
Act
Observe
Reflect
02
Protocol · Tool Integration
MCP — Model Context Protocol
One interface, every tool. Standardised connectors instead of N×M custom integrations.
03
Architecture · Multi-Agent
Subagents & Multi-Agent Systems
Delegated reasoning, isolated context. An orchestrator splits work across specialised subagents and merges the result.
04
Infrastructure · Control Plane
AI Gateway
One control plane, many models. Auth, rate-limits, logging, fallback — centralised in front of every provider.
05
Economics · Cost Model
Inference Economics
Tokens are the unit of cost. Cache-hits land at ~10 % of the price; misses pay full freight.
06
Quality · Measurement
Evals
What you can’t measure, you can’t ship. Test cases drive model output through a judge — pass/fail aggregates into shipping signals.
07
Safety · Brand Protection
Guardrails
Input filter blocks PII and prompt injections; output filter blocks jailbreaks, leaks, and policy violations.
08
Operations · Visibility
Observability
You can’t fix what you can’t see. Traces, logs, and metrics from every agent step land on one dashboard.
09
Principle · Sutton, 2019
The Bitter Lesson
Handcrafted rules are brittle and lose long-term. Methods that scale with compute & data win — every time the cycle repeats.