Glossary

The shop terms this book uses in a specific sense, each glossed at its first appearance in the narrative and gathered here for reference.

• Brief — The written instructions handed to an agent for a task: what to do, where, and how "done" is judged; the artifact the pre-canned template produces.
• Constraint — A governance mechanism that prevents drift by scoping the agent's action space so the wrong move is unavailable within a loop iteration (a typed enum instead of a string); the prevented mistake costs no failed iteration.
• Definition of done (DoD) — The explicit list of conditions a unit of work must meet to count as finished — tests present, docs updated, the model in sync — checked at the end rather than assumed.
• Dispatch — To hand a scoped unit of work to an agent and launch it; the orchestrator's act of starting a worker on a task.
• Epic — A tracked unit of work larger than one commit: a feature or effort with its own file, plan, and definition of done, carried out over several agent dispatches.
• Fleet — The set of coding agents working the codebase — the agentic-era workforce this book governs, in place of a team of human engineers.
• Gate — A check placed across a pipeline step — a commit, a deploy — that refuses to let the step through until its condition is met.
• Governance mechanism — A discrete named artifact that keeps the fleet's work aligned by preventing or detecting drift; the umbrella for a constraint or a sensor, replacing the ambiguous word "control".
• Governance package — A mechanism that bundles several: a soft constraint (a typed model that aims the agent) shipped with hard sensors (the lints and drift-parity gates that catch what the constraint only aims at).
• Lint — An automated check that scans code for a banned pattern and fails the commit when it finds one, so a rule holds without a human remembering it.
• Sensor — A governance mechanism that detects drift after the fact and fails the loop iteration, so the agent must run again to fix what it caught (a lint, a test, a gate); it costs iterations.
• Tombstone — The end-of-life marker an agent writes when its work has landed, signalling that its worktree is finished and safe to clean up.
• Worktree — A private, checked-out copy of the repository given to a single agent, so its in-progress edits never collide with another agent working at the same time.