Agentic Development Glossary
Subagent orchestration Decomposing a development task across multiple Claude Code subagents that run independently under a coordinating orchestrator, with explicit context isolation and result aggregation. Claude Code skills Versioned, model-invoked capability modules that extend Claude Code with domain procedures, loaded on demand rather than held in the base prompt. Agentic pipeline provenance A machine-readable trust chain stamped on each artifact recording the model version, skill version, knowledge-base hash, and validation pass log that produced it. Production agentic delivery Running Claude Code as the primary engineering surface for billable or production work, gated by deterministic validators rather than ad-hoc review. AI authoring trust chain The end-to-end set of deny-by-default gates that make AI-authored output verifiable: source substantiation, shape-only disclosure, and per-artifact provenance. MCP server A program that exposes tools, resources, and prompt templates to Claude Code and other Model Context Protocol clients over a standardized protocol, so an agent can read from and write to external systems without bespoke per-integration code. Claude Code hook A user-defined command or prompt that Claude Code runs automatically at a named lifecycle event, such as before or after a tool call, enabling deterministic enforcement of rules the agent cannot skip. Prompt caching A Claude API feature that stores a repeated context prefix server-side so later requests reuse it at reduced cost and latency, lowering the price of repetitive agentic workflows. Extended thinking A Claude capability that allocates the model a token budget for an internal reasoning phase before its final answer, trading speed and cost for deeper decomposition of complex tasks. Agent Skills open standard An open, cross-tool format documented at agentskills.io in which a skill directory bundles an entry instructions file with its supporting resources, so any compliant agent can discover and run the skill. Tool use A Claude API capability in which the model, given a set of tool definitions, emits a structured request to invoke one and resumes once the caller returns the result, letting an agent act on external systems rather than only generating text.
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