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.mcps. See modelcontextprotocol.io.

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.