If you are shipping agentic systems in 2026 and these six terms are fuzzy, you are building on sand. This is the foundational vocabulary — not hype, not vendor marketing, just the concepts that actually show up when you are designing, debugging, or scaling an agent pipeline.

The Six Terms

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The multi-agent space is fracturing fast. Teams pick LangGraph one quarter, switch to CrewAI the next, then discover Google ADK or AWS Strands and wonder if they should migrate again. Every switch costs weeks — ripping out abstractions, rewriting orchestration logic, re-testing state management. This is the exact problem Terraform solved …