lAItest / AI field guide · edition 2026-09-26
Know the language. Build with clarity.
Plain-English definitions for the concepts, patterns, protocols, and tools behind modern AI work.
414 defined terms · 16 topic areas · 50 essentials
Protocols & interoperability terms
19 matching terms.
- A2A Protocol · Protocols & interoperability
Agent2Agent: a protocol for communication between independently implemented agentic applications.
- ACP Protocol · Protocols & interoperability
Agent Client Protocol: standard communication between coding agents and editor or IDE clients.
- MCP Protocol · Protocols & interoperability
Model Context Protocol: a standard interface for exposing tools, resources, and prompts to AI applications.
- Agent Card Concept · Protocols & interoperability
An A2A capability description used to discover how to interact with an agent.
- Capability negotiation Concept · Protocols & interoperability
Participants establish which supported protocol features they can use together.
- JSON-RPC Protocol · Protocols & interoperability
A remote-procedure-call message format encoded with JSON.
- MCP client Concept · Protocols & interoperability
The protocol component communicating with an MCP server.
- MCP elicitation Concept · Protocols & interoperability
A protocol mechanism for a server to request user-provided information through the client.
- MCP host Concept · Protocols & interoperability
An application that coordinates its AI interaction and MCP client connections.
- MCP prompts Concept · Protocols & interoperability
Reusable prompt templates exposed by an MCP server.
- MCP resources Concept · Protocols & interoperability
Content exposed through MCP for an application to access as context.
- MCP sampling Concept · Protocols & interoperability
A protocol mechanism for requesting model generation through a client.
- MCP server Concept · Protocols & interoperability
A service or process exposing capabilities through MCP.
- MCP tools Concept · Protocols & interoperability
Operations exposed by an MCP server for a client to invoke.
- SSE Protocol · Protocols & interoperability
Server-Sent Events: an HTTP mechanism for streaming server-to-client events.
- Stateless MCP Concept · Protocols & interoperability
An informal shorthand for serving MCP requests without retaining transport session state between requests.
- stdio Concept · Protocols & interoperability
A local process transport using standard input and standard output.
- Streamable HTTP Concept · Protocols & interoperability
An HTTP-based MCP transport supporting protocol communication and optional streaming behavior.
- WebSocket Protocol · Protocols & interoperability
A persistent, bidirectional communication channel commonly used for realtime application traffic.
Browse by topic
- Agents & architecture 23 — Who decides, what executes, and where control lives.
- Goals, specs & plans 23 — Describe the outcome before delegating the implementation.
- Loops, critics & adversaries 33 — Understand how work is challenged, repaired, and stopped.
- Multi-agent coordination 21 — Delegation, ownership, context boundaries, and aggregation.
- Context & memory 29 — What the model sees now, and what persists for later.
- Tools & output contracts 20 — Model proposals become validated, authorized operations.
- Protocols & interoperability 19 — Name the boundary: tools, agents, editors, or interfaces.
- Coding-agent internals 25 — Instructions, skills, hooks, tools, and durable artifacts.
- Retrieval & knowledge 31 — Find evidence, rank it, and preserve source boundaries.
- Evals & observability 29 — Measure outcomes and inspect the execution path.
- Inference & performance 28 — Latency, throughput, compute, and memory are different constraints.
- Models, reasoning & training 36 — Separate weight changes from context and inference-time work.
- Security & reliability 27 — Make privileges explicit and side effects recoverable.
- Generative UI & voice 18 — The interaction layer has its own contracts and timing.
- Generative & physical AI 8 — Broader model families beyond text-based assistants.
- Tools & ecosystem 44 — Recognize the role before choosing the dependency.