Glossary
Glossary
The terms Chainfore uses for reliable autonomous systems, each with one definition, an example and related terms.
Terms
01Agent reliability engineeringThe practice of bounding, verifying, recovering and measuring AI agents that act inside enterprise systems, so that autonomy is expanded on evidence.02Transcript versus outcomeThe distinction between what an agent reports it did and the state of the system it touched. Reliability is graded on the outcome.03pass^kThe probability that an agent succeeds on all k independent attempts at a task, as opposed to pass@k, the probability that at least one attempt succeeds. Enterprises need pass^k.04Staged autonomyGranting an agent authority in four stages: offline, shadow, supervised, limited; each expansion requires owner approval and new evidence.05Bounded workflowA business process in which the data an agent may read, the tools it may call and the actions needing approval are defined in code before the agent runs.06Read-back verificationAfter an agent writes to a system of record, reading the record back to confirm the intended change exists exactly once.07Buyer scorecardA weighted comparison of AI agent suppliers on a hidden test set: outcome, control and recovery, integration, economics, accountability.08Evaluation standardChainfore's seven published measures for an agent in production and the rule that every figure carries method, baseline, repeat count and limits.