01
A–Z
- Back pressure
- A control principle: autonomy must not exceed the capacity of the verification system that receives its output.
- Comprehension debt
- The growing gap between the software that exists and the software humans still understand. Popularized in 2026 factory discourse.
- Dark factory
- A pipeline that turns specifications into production software without human code review. Shapiro’s Level 5, January 2026.
- Harness engineering
- The discipline of designing context, tools, constraints, memory, feedback sensors, and control flow around coding agents. Böckeler / Thoughtworks, 2026.
- Light factory
- An agentic production pipeline with human judgment retained at selected approval gates, usually merge or release.
- Ralph loop
- A fresh-context iterative agent pattern: one task per run, filesystem as memory, repeat until the work queue is empty. Huntley, July 2025.
- Satisfaction
- StrongDM’s probabilistic framing: the share of observed trajectories likely to satisfy the user, rather than one boolean “tests pass.”
- Verification debt
- The accumulating cost and risk of AI-generated work that has not received credible independent verification. Associated with Werner Vogels, 2026.