Vocabulary for building AI agents that plan, act, and recover from failure in production systems.
An AI system that can autonomously take a sequence of actions to complete a goal, rather than just producing a single response. It decides what to do next based on observations from previous steps.
A hidden instruction block prepended to every conversation that tells the model its role, constraints, available tools, and behavioral rules. It's the developer's primary way of shaping agent behavior.
The ability of an LLM to call predefined functions or external APIs as part of generating a response. The model outputs a structured call (e.g. search(query='...')) and the host application actually executes it.