Agentic AI: a tech lead's glossary Study notes from coursers like Pluralsight on agentic AI and other references, organized as a glossary I wish I'd had on day one. Every dev I know is using AI tools, and most of us are fuzzy on the words behind them. Where does a transformer fit in? What does MCP actually solve? Is "agentic AI" a real thing or just rebranded chatbots? This is my map of the territory: machine learning at the bottom, agents and MCP at the top, and the concepts in between — tokens, memory, tools, RAG, vector databases. Built for lookup, not for a single read-through. If a term is fuzzy in your head, jump to it. Foundations Machine Learning Normal coding: you write the rules. "If the email subject says 'free money,' mark it as spam." Machine learning flips that. You don't write the rules — the program finds them by trial and error.…