Glossary category
Tools and protocols
The interfaces and contracts that let AI systems act on software and external services.
What belongs here
Tool calling, capabilities, gateways, protocols, schemas, and interoperability boundaries.
What belongs elsewhere
The reasoning policy that chooses a tool and the security policy that authorizes it.
Adjacent categories
Start with
Factory areas
Definitions in this category
stable
Agent Card
An A2A document that declares an agent's identity, interfaces, capabilities, skills, and security requirements for discovery.
Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)
An open protocol for discovery, messaging, and asynchronous task collaboration between independent and potentially opaque agent systems.
Application programming interface (API)
A defined contract through which software components request capabilities or exchange data.
Latency
Elapsed time from a request or event to its response or completion.
MCP capability negotiation
The initialization exchange in which an MCP client and server declare the optional protocol features each supports.
MCP client
The protocol component maintained by an MCP host that establishes and manages a connection to one MCP server.
MCP host
The AI application that manages model interaction, user experience, policy, and connections to one or more MCP clients and servers.
MCP prompt
A reusable, user-selectable template exposed by an MCP server to structure messages or workflows for a model interaction.
MCP resource
Contextual data exposed by an MCP server under a URI so a client or application can retrieve and supply it to a model.
MCP server
A program or service that exposes MCP capabilities such as tools, resources, and prompts to connected clients.
MCP tool
A model-discoverable executable function exposed by an MCP server with a name, description, and input schema.
Model Context Protocol (MCP)
An open client-server protocol for connecting AI applications to tools, resources, and reusable prompts through standardized discovery and invocation.
Rate limit
A provider or system constraint on requests, tokens, compute, or actions permitted within a time window.
Sandbox
An isolated execution environment that limits access to files, processes, networks, credentials, or other host resources.
Throughput
The amount of work a system completes per unit time.
Tool
An executable capability exposed to an AI application or agent, such as reading a file, querying an API, running code, or changing external state.
working
Capability
A specific action or class of action a component is technically able and authorized to perform within a system.
Ephemeral environment
A short-lived execution environment created for a run and discarded afterward.
Execution lineage
A reconstructable record linking an outcome to the initiating intent, model, harness, tools, inputs, actions, evidence, and state transitions that produced it.
MCP gateway
An intermediary deployment component that fronts one or more MCP servers and centralizes concerns such as routing, authentication, policy, limits, or audit.