Reference · Updated July 20, 2026
The AI agent vocabulary, defined in plain English. Every term opens with a 40–60 word answer, then explains where the line really falls, with examples drawn from the real agents we index, not abstractions. Built for people who want the distinction, not the hype.
Agentic coding is software development in which an AI agent autonomously plans and carries out multi-step engineering tasks — reading the codebase, editing files, running tests, and fixing its own errors in a loop — rather than just suggesting the next line.
Read definition →Agentic trading is the use of an autonomous AI agent to make or execute trading decisions — analyzing markets, generating buy and sell signals, and placing orders through a brokerage with limited human input.
Read definition →Agentic commerce is online buying and selling carried out by AI agents acting on a person's behalf — researching options, comparing prices, and completing purchases or payments with bounded authority.
Read definition →An AI SDR is an AI agent that automates the work of a sales development representative: finding prospects, researching them, writing and sending personalized outreach across email and LinkedIn, handling replies, and booking meetings.
Read definition →An AI agent is an autonomous software program that pursues a goal on its own.
Read definition →An AI agent is a single autonomous program that perceives input, decides, and acts on a goal using a language model plus tools.
Read definition →A chatbot is a conversational interface that answers messages, usually within a single turn and without acting on the outside world.
Read definition →Agentic AI is the branch of artificial intelligence in which software pursues goals autonomously instead of waiting for step-by-step instructions.
Read definition →An AI agent works by running a loop: it takes a goal, gathers context, uses a large language model to reason about the next step, calls a tool to act on the world, observes the result, then repeats — planning, acting, and self-correcting across many steps until the goal is met or a limit stops it..
Read definition →A multi-agent system is a setup where several specialized AI agents work together on a task, each handling a role — such as planning, building, criticizing, or researching — and coordinating through a shared workflow or an orchestrator.
Read definition →Prompt injection is a security attack where hidden instructions are placed inside content an AI agent reads — a web page, email, document, or API response — tricking the agent into treating those instructions as commands rather than data.
Read definition →Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a technique where an AI model fetches relevant documents from an external knowledge source and uses them as context to ground its answer, instead of relying only on what it memorized during training.
Read definition →The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard, introduced by Anthropic in 2024, that defines a common way for AI agents to connect to external tools, data sources, and services.
Read definition →An AI assistant helps you do tasks: it answers questions, drafts things, and waits for your next instruction.
Read definition →AI agents are classified two ways.
Read definition →Looking for products instead of definitions? See the full index of AI agents or the head-to-head comparisons.