Glossary

One-line definitions of the terms that recur across the ADL docs. Each entry links to the page where the concept is covered in full.

Looking for spec.acronyms? That's a schema field that tells generators how to case identifiers - not a glossary. This page defines ADL's vocabulary instead.

A2A

The agent-to-agent protocol that ADL manifests describe: how an agent advertises its capabilities and exchanges messages with clients and other agents. An A2A agent does not require an LLM. See A2A & the Agent Card.

AgentCard

The public, protocol-level description of a deployed agent - endpoint URL, protocol version, and supported input/output modes - surfaced to clients and registries. Declared under spec.capabilities and spec.card; see A2A & the Agent Card.

consumer

Any tool that reads an ADL manifest and acts on it: a generator, runtime, or registry. ADL defines the contract; consumers supply the implementation. See What is ADL?.

dependency injection (DI)

The pattern ADL uses to give a tool typed handles to the services it needs: a tool lists service names under inject and the generator wires the matching spec.services in.

generator

A consumer that turns a manifest into a ready-to-run project in a target language - for example adl-cli. See What is ADL?.

MCP (Model Context Protocol)

An open protocol for connecting an agent to external tool and context servers at runtime, configured under spec.agent.mcp. See Connecting to MCP Servers.

orchestrator

A coding-agent integration - Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, OpenCode, or infer - that spec.development.ai can provision inside the dev sandbox.

rc channel

The pre-release channel: rc/* branches publish release candidates from the manual Release workflow, kept separate from stable tags. See Versioning.

registry

A consumer that indexes manifests - for example by metadata.tags and the chosen provider - so agents can be discovered. See What is ADL?.

runtime

A consumer that loads a manifest and executes the agent. ADL itself is not a runtime; it only describes the agent. See What is ADL?.

sandbox

A reproducible local development environment - flox, devcontainer, or Docker Compose - selected under spec.development.sandbox.

SPDX

The standard identifier scheme for software licenses (e.g. MIT, Apache-2.0). ADL accepts a single SPDX identifier or Proprietary for metadata.license and spec.skills[].license. See License identifiers.