Reference
Agent Reliability Engineering Glossary
Canonical definitions for the properties, risks, controls, and operating principles used to make autonomous AI systems reliable in production.
Core Agent Reliability Engineering terms
- Agent Reliability Engineering (ARE)
- A software engineering discipline for making AI agents reliable, governable, observable, recoverable, and accountable in production. ARE treats reliability as an architectural property rather than a runtime afterthought.
- AI Agent Reliability
- The degree to which an autonomous AI agent consistently behaves as intended, operates within its authorized scope, remains resilient under expected and adverse conditions, and can be observed, contained, and recovered when failures occur.
- Reliability Surface
- The multidimensional set of behavioral properties and engineering controls that determine how reliably an autonomous AI agent operates under realistic conditions.
- Reliability Debt
- The accumulated risk created when an autonomous system's capabilities, complexity, or authority grow faster than its reliability engineering.
- Progressive Autonomy
- The principle that an AI agent earns greater operational authority as measured reliability improves and loses authority when reliability deteriorates.
- Agent Authority
- The explicitly defined and enforceable scope of actions an AI agent may perform, including tools, resources, data, systems, financial limits, delegation rights, approval requirements, and prohibited actions.
- Agent Governance
- The policies, controls, processes, accountability, and evidence used to ensure an AI agent operates within its intended identity, authority, behavioral requirements, risk boundaries, and organizational obligations.
- Agent Reliability Controls
- The technical and operational mechanisms that keep autonomous behavior inside defined reliability, authority, safety, and recovery boundaries.
- Reliability Maturity
- The degree to which an autonomous system has implemented, validated, and continuously improved the engineering capabilities required for reliable operation.
- Reliability Evidence
- Evaluation results, tests, traces, incidents, policy outcomes, recovery outcomes, and other verifiable records used to justify an agent's operating authority.
- Authority Lineage
- The traceable chain showing how authority was assigned, constrained, delegated, exercised, and revoked across an agent or multi-agent workflow.
- Reliability Drift
- A measurable deterioration or material change in behavior, policy compliance, cost, recovery, or predictability after a model, prompt, tool, environment, or input distribution changes.