GLOSSARY

The language of agents.

Plain-English definitions of the concepts, infrastructure, and security terms behind a self-hosted fleet of AI agents.

A

Agent Archival

Moving an inactive AI agent into long-term storage while preserving its state for future restoration.

Agent Driver

The pluggable execution engine that governs how an Agenhood agent reasons and calls tools.

Agent Fleet

A collection of AI agents provisioned, run, and managed together under shared infrastructure.

Agent Lifecycle

The states an AI agent moves through, from creation to deletion, and the actions that move it between them.

Agent Loop

The core observe, plan, act, and repeat cycle an AI agent runs through to complete a task.

Agent Memory

The mechanisms by which an AI agent retains and reuses information across tasks and sessions.

Agent Orchestration

The coordination layer that manages how AI agents are provisioned, scheduled, and monitored.

Agent Recovery

Bringing an AI agent out of an error state and back into normal operation.

Agent Runtime

The live, running instance of an agent: a Docker container provisioned and driven by the control plane.

Agent Shim

The PID-1 process inside every Agenhood agent container that runs the driver and streams events out.

Agent Skill

A reusable, packaged set of instructions that extends what an AI agent knows how to do.

Agent Task

A single unit of work submitted to one Agenhood agent, with a free text or schema validated output.

Agent Template

A preconfigured bundle of driver, model, tools, skills, and prompt used to provision an agent in one step.

Agent Workspace

The persistent /workspace volume attached to an agent, surviving restarts, pauses, and archival.

Agentic AI

AI systems designed around planning, tool use, and iterative action rather than single-shot output.

Agentic Workflow

A multi-step task in which an agent plans, acts, evaluates results, and adapts its approach.

AI Agent

A software system that uses a model to reason, act, and complete tasks with limited human input.

AI Agent Observability

The ability to inspect and understand what an autonomous AI agent did, and why, during or after a task.

API Key

A secret token that authenticates requests to an API without a username and password.

Auto-Wake

The automatic transition of a paused AI agent back to a running state when it receives new work.

Autonomous Agent

An AI agent that makes decisions and completes multi-step tasks with minimal human oversight.

B

Bash Tool

A tool that gives an AI agent the ability to execute shell commands during a task.

C

Cloud Metadata Endpoint

A special address cloud instances use to query their own configuration and credentials.

Code Execution Sandbox

An isolated environment where agent generated code runs without affecting the host system.

Command Palette

A keyboard-driven quick-navigation and action menu in the Agenhood console, opened with Cmd+K.

Container Sandbox

An isolated runtime, built from OS-level virtualization, that restricts what a process can see and do.

Context Window

The maximum amount of text a language model can process at once, measured in tokens.

Control Plane

The stateless FastAPI service that owns Agenhood's public API and provisions agent containers.

Cron Schedule

A cron-based cadence that triggers a prompt or a task workflow at defined times.

D

Docker Compose

A tool for defining and running a multi-container application from one declarative configuration file.

E

Egress Filtering

The practice of inspecting and restricting outbound network traffic leaving a system.

Egress Proxy

A network intermediary that all outbound traffic from a system must pass through.

Encrypted Credential Storage

Storing secrets such as API keys and tokens in encrypted form so plaintext is never exposed at rest.

F

Fine-Tuning

Continuing a pretrained model's training on a smaller dataset to adjust its behavior.

G

Git Backup Remote

An external Git repository, connected over SSH, that receives a copy of an agent's workspace after each task.

H

Hallucination

Confident but false or fabricated output produced by a language model.

Headless Browser Automation

Programmatically controlling a browser without a visible interface to render and read pages.

Human in the Loop

A design pattern where a person reviews or approves an AI agent's actions at defined points.

I

Idempotency

A property where performing an operation multiple times has the same effect as performing it once.

Idle Auto-Pause

An automated policy that pauses an inactive AI agent to free up compute resources until it is needed again.

In-Browser Terminal

A terminal in the Agenhood console, linked over WebSocket, giving a shell inside an agent's container.

Integration Connector

A standalone service that lets external events like GitHub issues or Slack messages trigger Agenhood agents.

L

Large Language Model

A neural network trained on massive text data to predict and generate human language.

Linux Capabilities

A mechanism for splitting root privileges into narrow, independently grantable units.

Live Task Viewer

The console view that renders an agent's task event stream in real time as a task runs.

Long-Lived Agent

An AI agent instance that persists across tasks and sessions instead of being recreated each time.

M

Model Catalog

A curated list of language models an application or platform makes available to choose from.

Model Context Protocol

The open protocol for connecting AI applications to external tools and data sources.

Model Provider

A company that develops and offers access to large language models, usually via an API.

Multi-Agent System

An architecture where multiple AI agents with distinct roles coordinate to complete a shared task.

Multi-Tenancy

An architecture where a single application instance serves multiple isolated customers or organizations.

N

Non-Destructive Rollback

Reverting an AI agent to a prior state without discarding the state that existed before the rollback.

O

OAuth

An open standard that lets one application access resources on another without sharing passwords.

Output Contract

A task level specification defining the required shape of an AI agent's final answer.

P

PKCE

A security extension to OAuth that protects authorization code exchanges from interception.

Prompt Engineering

The practice of designing prompts to reliably get the desired output from a language model.

Prompt Injection

A security risk where untrusted input manipulates a language model into ignoring its instructions.

R

Rate Limiting

Restricting how many requests a client can make to an API within a given period of time.

Read-Only Root Filesystem

A container configuration where the base filesystem cannot be modified while the container runs.

Resource Limits

Constraints on how much CPU, memory, or other resources a process or container may consume.

REST API

An architectural style for web APIs that models functionality as resources accessed via HTTP methods.

Restore Point

A saved snapshot of an AI agent's state at a specific point in time that it can be reverted to.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation

A technique combining a language model with external document retrieval to ground its answers.

Reverse Proxy

A server that forwards incoming client requests to the appropriate backend service.

Role-Based Access Control

An authorization model that grants permissions based on a user's assigned role rather than individually.

S

Sandboxed Agent

An AI agent whose actions run inside an isolated environment separate from the host system.

Self-Hosted Infrastructure

Software and systems an organization runs on its own servers instead of a third-party managed service.

Self-Hosted Search Engine

A web search service an organization deploys on its own infrastructure instead of a third-party provider.

Server-Sent Events

A web standard for streaming a one-way sequence of updates from a server to a client over one connection.

Single-VM Deployment

An architecture where an entire application, including all its services, runs on one virtual machine.

Structured Output

A model response constrained to a defined, machine readable format such as JSON.

System Prompt

The instructions given to an AI model before a conversation to set its role and behavior.

T

Task Event Stream

The ordered sequence of structured events an Agenhood agent emits while a task is running.

Task Workflow

An ordered pipeline that chains multiple agent tasks together, possibly across different agents.

Temperature

A parameter that controls how random or predictable a language model's output is.

Tenant

An isolated organization, account, or workspace within a multi-tenant system.

Token

The basic unit of text, such as a word piece, that a language model reads and generates.

Token Budget

A limit on how many tokens a request, task, or agent is allowed to consume.

Tool Use

How AI models call external functions to act on the world instead of only generating text.

V

Vanilla Driver

Agenhood's built-in tool-use loop driver, configured directly instead of an external harness.

Vendor Lock-In

A dependency on a single vendor's platform that makes switching to an alternative costly or impractical.

W

Web Fetch Tool

A tool that retrieves the full content of a specific URL for an AI agent to read.

Web Search Tool

A tool that lets an AI agent query the web and retrieve results to inform its answers.

Webhook

A callback mechanism where one system notifies another of an event via an HTTP request to a preset URL.

WebSocket

A protocol providing a persistent, two-way communication channel between a client and a server.

Workspace Snapshot

An automatic, restorable capture of an agent's workspace, taken after every completed task.

Z

Zero Trust Networking

A network security model that verifies every connection instead of trusting internal networks by default.