SYSTEMS
Agentic workflows, protocols, retrieval and the ledger. The machinery around the generation, which is the half that survives a model change.
Agentic Workflow
A process where a model plans and executes several steps against real tools, with a person deciding at named checkpoints instead of approving every keystroke.
Batch Rendering
Running a group of related generations as one unit with shared settings, a shared ledger and a shared decision point at the end.
Checkpoint
A saved snapshot of a model’s weights at a point in training, and the thing you pin when you say a pipeline is reproducible.
Connector
The link between a model and a piece of software a team already runs, and usually the difference between a system that gets adopted and one that does not.
Consent File
The folder of signed permissions and licences that has to exist before the first render.
Content Atomisation
Breaking one long piece into a set of claims and rebuilding each as a native asset for a different format.
Context Engineering
Deciding what a model sees for a given task, which is where the outcome is decided and the wording is not.
Context Window
The maximum amount of input a model can consider at once, measured in tokens, and a hard ceiling on how much brief it can hold.
Cost Per Accepted Asset
The only generation metric that means anything: total spend divided by the number of assets that shipped.
Credit Ceiling
An agreed maximum spend per asset, encoded in the pipeline so a run halts and asks for a decision instead of quietly spending past it.
Data Minimisation
Putting only the data a task needs into a model, and never keys, client data or unreleased assets.
Embedding
A list of numbers representing a piece of text, an image or a clip, positioned so that similar things sit close together.
Eval
A fixed set of test cases with known good answers, run against a workflow to catch it getting worse.
Gate
A named, mechanical test a frame must pass before anyone sees it, with a stated action on failure.
Guardrail
A hard limit on what a workflow can do, enforced by the system itself.
Human in the Loop
A named person with authority to stop the run, placed at the points in a workflow where a wrong decision is expensive.
Identity Lock
Our pipeline for synthetic presenters: train the face once from a stills sheet, then run every subsequent variant from that trained identity.
Inference
Running a trained model to produce an output, as distinct from training it, and the part you are billed for per use.
MCP
An open protocol for connecting a model to external tools and data through a standard interface, so a capability written once works across clients.
Naming Convention
An agreed, machine-applied pattern for naming files, and the single highest-return thing to automate in a creative team.
Operator Stack
Our pipeline for the unglamorous layer: skills, code, connectors, naming, versioning and the ledger that makes a creative studio explainable to a finance team.
Orchestration
The layer that decides what runs when and what happens on failure, plus the points where a person is asked to decide.
Phantom Set
Our pipeline for any subject a customer can hold up against the picture: lock a master plate, specify the set once, then generate every angle from the plate.
Quantisation
Storing a model’s weights at lower numeric precision so it runs on smaller hardware, at some cost to output quality.
RAG
Fetching relevant source material at run time and giving it to the model, so the answer comes from documents and not from memory.
Run Log
The automatic record of what a pipeline did, what it cost and what happened at each gate, which is what makes a system auditable.
Skill
A self-contained folder of instructions and resources a model loads on demand for a particular kind of job, instead of one enormous instruction it always carries.
Token
The unit a language model reads and writes, roughly a short word or a fragment of one. It is also the unit most models are billed by.
Tool Calling
A model requesting that a defined function be run and reading the result, which is the mechanism that turns a chat into a workflow.
Enough theory.
Bring us the launch and we will show you which of these terms is about to cost you a week.