Glossary

Overview

The book and the toolkit share a small vocabulary, and it shows up everywhere once you know it. These are the short, dictionary versions of the ten terms that matter most, each one linking back to where the idea gets its full treatment.

All terms

• Agent Readiness

  The 0 to 10 score, with a band, that cdad check produces for a repo.

• Capability

  A business-facing unit of behavior with inputs, outputs, and non-goals.

• Capability Graph

  The directed dependency map of every contract in a repo.

• Contract

  The declaration of what a capability does, needs, promises, and won't do.

• Contract-Driven AI Development

  C-DAD, the discipline the book and toolkit are both built around.

• Extraction

  Pulling a capability out of tribal knowledge and into a contract.

• Legibility

  Whether a capability's behavior can be understood without tribal knowledge.

• Minimum Viable Contract

  The smallest set of fields a contract needs to be useful.

• Non-Goals

  The explicit statement of what a capability deliberately does not do.

• Tribal Knowledge

  Undocumented operational knowledge that lives in people's heads, not in the system.