Terminology

2185 terms, tools, patterns and metrics an architect is expected to use precisely. Each one gets a short explanation of what it is, and — where it matters — what it is commonly confused with. Search filters as you type; the column headers sort.

All areas2185 Architecture Fundamentals77 Distributed Systems107 Data Architecture110 Cloud Architecture89 Networking88 API & Integration Architecture82 Reliability & Resilience75 Observability70 Performance & Capacity Engineering72 Security Architecture81 Cost Architecture & FinOps66 Business Architecture67 Architecture Communication67 Enterprise Architecture66 Legacy Modernization66 AI-Era Architecture69 Software Architecture & Engineering71 Architecture Patterns71 Architecture Decision-Making63 The Architect's Meta-Skills61 Delivery & Release Engineering66 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience70 Testing & Quality Architecture66 Data Platform Architecture64 Streaming & Real-Time Data69 Data Governance & Semantics69 Frontend & Experience Architecture66 Edge, Mobile & IoT68 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture65 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk64

Kind Any concept785 practice729 pattern362 metric125 case-study77 tool62 protocol45

23 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Agent Handoff	pattern	Multi-Agent Systems	The transfer of a task and its context from one specialised agent to another, and the point at which multi-agent systems most often lose information.
Agent Tool Authorisation	pattern	Tool Calling	Enforcing that a tool invoked by a model executes with the requesting user's permissions rather than the application's, and that consequential actions require confirmation.
Agent Transcript Compaction Loop History Summarisation, Working Memory Compaction	pattern	Agent Architectures	Replacing the resolved middle of a long agent loop with a short summary while preserving the original goal and constraints verbatim, so token cost stops growing quadratically and late steps still follow early …
AI Gateway	pattern	AI-Era Architecture	A shared proxy in front of model providers that centralises routing, keys, quotas, caching, logging and safety policy.
AI Gateway Pattern LLM Proxy, Model Router	pattern	AI Gateways	A single control point through which all model calls pass, providing routing, cost control, caching, logging, guardrails and provider abstraction.
Chunked Prefill Prefill Splitting, Interleaved Prefill, Piecewise Prompt Processing	pattern	AI Cost Management	Breaking a long prompt's prefill into pieces interleaved with other sequences' decode steps, so that one enormous request cannot stall every in-flight interactive response.
Contextual Retrieval Contextual Chunk Prefixing, Contextual Embeddings	pattern	Chunking & Retrieval	Prepending a short generated description of where a chunk sits in its document before embedding it, so that a passage full of pronouns and bare figures still matches the query that should find it.
Filtered Vector Search Predicate-Constrained ANN, Metadata Filtering in ANN	pattern	Vector Databases	Combining a metadata predicate with approximate nearest-neighbour search - where the predicate's selectivity, not the corpus size, decides whether results are correct or latency collapses.
Guardrails	pattern	Guardrails	Deterministic checks applied to model inputs and outputs, enforcing constraints that the model itself cannot be relied upon to respect.
Human in the Loop HITL	pattern	AI-Era Architecture	Requiring human review or approval at a defined point in an automated flow, chosen by the reversibility and cost of the action.
Human-in-the-Loop Design	pattern	Human in the Loop	Placing human review at the points where model error is consequential, designed so the review is genuinely effective rather than nominal.
Hybrid Retrieval Dense + Sparse Retrieval, BM25 + Vector	pattern	RAG Architecture	Running lexical keyword search and dense vector search together and fusing the results, because each fails where the other succeeds.
Model Cascade Tiered Inference, Escalation Ladder	pattern	Model Selection	A cheap fast model handling the clear majority of cases with escalation to a larger model or a human for the uncertain ones - usually a large cost reduction with no quality loss, because the expensive path run…
Model Router	pattern	AI-Era Architecture	Directing each request to a model chosen by the task's difficulty, cost and latency budget, rather than sending everything to the largest model available.
Model Routing	pattern	Model Selection	Directing each request to the cheapest model capable of handling it, rather than sending all traffic to the most capable one.
Output Validation Layer	pattern	Guardrails	A deterministic check applied to model output before it is used, treating the model as an untrusted component.
Reranking Cross-Encoder Reranking	pattern	Reranking	Retrieving a wide candidate set cheaply, then reordering it with a more expensive model that scores each candidate against the query directly.
Retrieval Pipeline Stages	pattern	RAG Architecture	The stages that turn a user question into grounded context — query processing, retrieval, reranking and assembly — each independently tunable.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation RAG	pattern	AI-Era Architecture	Retrieving relevant documents at query time and putting them in the model's context, so answers are grounded in your data rather than in training data.
Semantic Cache	pattern	AI-Era Architecture	Caching model responses keyed by the meaning of the request rather than by its exact text, so near-duplicate questions are served without a model call.
Tool Calling Function Calling	pattern	AI-Era Architecture	Giving a model a set of typed function definitions it can request to invoke, with the application executing the call and returning the result.
Tool Result Budget Tool Output Capping, Result Truncation Contract	pattern	Tool Calling	A hard cap on the tokens any single tool may return into the model's context, with pagination and summarisation behind it, so that one unlucky query cannot fill the window and end the run.
Two-Stage Retrieval	pattern	Reranking	Retrieving a broad candidate set cheaply and then reordering it with an expensive, more accurate model.