Glossary/ 12 terms
What do the words in an AI proposal actually mean?
Most of them describe a decision somebody made about what happens when the system fails, and they are worth understanding because that is where the cost sits. Each entry below defines one term in a paragraph, says why an operator cares, and shows where it turns up in a system OCTYN builds and runs.
- AI agentalso agent, agentic systemA program given a goal and tools, choosing its own next step.
- Dry runalso dry-run mode, no-op modeEverything except the part that changes something. Default, not a flag.
- Hallucinationalso confabulation, made-up outputFluent, plausible, false. The model is working as designed.
- Human in the loopalso HITL, human reviewA person approves before the system acts, while that approval is still real.
- Observabilityalso monitoring, alertingAnswering why, from what was already recorded.
- Orchestrationalso workflow engine, pipelineWhat runs, in what order, and what happens when a step fails.
- p95 latencyalso 95th percentile latency, tail latencyThe slowest 1 in 20. Averages hide exactly what users notice.
- Rate limitingalso throttling, 429, quotaThe provider says no. What happens next is your architecture.
- Retrieval augmented generationalso RAGSearch your documents first, then let the model answer from them.
- Rollbackalso revert, staged rolloutPutting the last working version back, on a path somebody has walked.
- Total cost of ownershipalso TCOLicences, runtime, attention, dependencies, and the cost to change.
- Webhookalso callback URL, HTTP callbackThey call you when it happens, instead of you asking every minute.
The arguments behind them
where these terms decide something a buyer pays for5- Six months laterWhat does it cost to change an AI workflow six months later?
- The checklistWhat does production ready actually mean for an AI system?
- Silent failureWhy did your AI automation break without anyone noticing?
- At volumeWhat happens to a glued workflow at 10,000 executions a month?
- Buy or buildShould you buy a tool and bend your workflow, or build around the workflow you have?
Every one of these turns up in a consult. None of them is charged for.
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