Glossary | AEPAEP terms, defined once.AEPreferenceaepreferenceadopterdevelopertry-spec-driven-developmentunderstand-safe-agentic-codingreference

Glossary

Term	Definition
AEP	Agentic Engineering Protocol: the generic substrate governing how engineering work is performed and proven complete.
ADP / AOP	Development and operations profiles over AEP, with profile-specific workflows and vocabulary.
Protocol document	The vocabulary declaration: capabilities, evidence kinds, verifiers, phases, and observable fact families.
Principle	One enforceable rule: when it applies, what it requires, by when, and who may attest it.
Profile	A bundle of protocol, workflow, principles, capability policy, and completion condition.
Workflow	A validated state machine whose transitions are guarded by predicates over evidence.
Phase	A label on workflow states that principles use to time obligations across different workflows.
Task	Governed work: objective, kind, profile, context facts, and artifact manifest.
Artifact	One item of the plan — a story, an epic, a review, a blocker — with a kind, a status, relations and a Markdown body. In the Git-native store it is one file, `.engineering/planning/<kind>/<name>.md`.
Lifecycle	The ladder of statuses one artifact kind may hold, and the moves between them, declared in a YAML file.
Rung	One status on a lifecycle. A rung may cost evidence (`requires:`) or open on a date (`when:`).
Transition	One recorded move, appended to the artifact's `transitions` list by `aep plan artifact move`.
Evidence file	One immutable JSON record about an artifact under `.engineering/evidence/`, counted by `move` against a rung's price.
Scope	The paths a story lands on, each `cited` or `inferred`; read by `aep plan artifact waves`.
Wave	A set of stories that share no scope path and no dependency, so they can be implemented at the same time.
Workspace	Several repositories whose plans `aep plan workspace` answers across, named in `.engineering/workspace.yaml`.
Capability	A named permission. It defaults to deny; deny outranks approval-required, which outranks allow.
Approval floor	A capability that no profile may grant outright; a matching operation always requires approval or remains denied.
Evidence	A typed observation with kind, producer, subject, provenance, and observation time. Predicates read facts projected from it.
`observed_at`	When somebody looked, distinct from when a record was submitted.
Horizon	The age after which an observation stops satisfying a requirement and becomes Unknown again.
Producer	The agent or verifier that made an observation. Independent requirements accept verifier-produced records only.
Truth	`True`, `False`, or `Unknown`. Only True permits a guarded transition.
Harness	The external system that runs an agent and asks AEP what is owed, permitted, and done.
Execution	One task's run through a workflow: state, evidence order, events, and audit trail.
Step map	An `aep.driver-steps/2` (or, before 0.72.0, `/1`) document saying what a harness does in each workflow state.
Driven run	A workflow walk by `aep drive`; the driver asks the engine and performs only the steps it permits.
Planning store	The plan of one repository. Since `aep.project/5` it is the Git-native store: one Markdown file per artifact and one JSON file per evidence record, written through `aep plan artifact`, with Git as the history.
Backend	An implementation of the AEP storage command and query contracts.
Contract conformance	Whether a backend implements the AEP storage contract, checked by `aep plan conformance`.
ESS conformance report	A standalone report emitted by ESS and optionally converted into AEP evidence by `aep-ess-evidence`.
Trace specification	Typed expectations over an agent transcript; `aep observe trace check` judges the finished run three-valued.
Gate	The repository's authoritative `task check` entry point.