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Concepts

The lexicon. Nineteen concepts in four groups: the structural spine, the Managed Agents primitives, the cost levers, and the patterns proven in 256 published customer stories.

Hand-drawn line illustration in warm terracotta and cream: two loopy hands sort small cream tiles into neat square clusters, observed by a face drawn in a single line.

Each concept is one short page: a quotable definition line, a body that earns the term with named sources, and Further Reading that makes the lexicon a graph. Case-study claims quote the company's own published page and link to it; API details defer to platform.claude.com/docs, which is always the authority.

The structural spine​

The vocabulary for the platform's one big architectural question: what do you own, and what do you delegate?

  • The Harness: the software loop around the model: tool dispatch, context management, retries, and compaction. The half of an agent that is code rather than model.
  • The Deployment: everything an agent runs on: sandboxing, session persistence, tenant isolation, secrets handling, and capacity.
  • The Four Ways to Build: manual loop, Tool Runner, Agent SDK, Managed Agents, separated by who supplies the harness and who supplies the deployment.
  • Agent Once, Session Every Run: create the versioned agent config once, create a session per run; agent creation in the request path is the anti-pattern.

The Managed Agents primitives​

What the managed platform runs so a small team does not have to build it.

  • Vaults: secrets never enter the sandbox; they are substituted into outbound requests at egress, so a prompt injection has nothing to steal.
  • Outcomes: define done as a rubric, and the platform runs an iterate, grade, revise loop with a separate grader until the work passes.
  • Memory Stores: workspace-scoped persistent memory mounted into every session, versioned and auditable.
  • Scheduled Deployments: cron for agents: a schedule fires a fresh session on the clock, and every firing leaves a run record.
  • The Human Gate: an approval step the platform enforces before an action commits; a prompt can ask for approval, a permission policy guarantees it.

Cost and economics​

The levers that decide whether an agent product has margins.

  • Prompt Caching: cached input reads cost a fraction of base price, but the cache is a strict prefix match: one changed byte invalidates everything after it.
  • The Batch API: 50 percent off input and output tokens for anything that can wait up to 24 hours; stacks with caching.
  • The Effort Dial and Model Splitting: frontier-model tokens for judgment, small-model tokens for commodity steps, effort turned down where thinking is wasted.
  • Consumption Pricing: the platform bills by tokens consumed, not seats sold, so the bill scales with how much the product actually runs.

Patterns proven in the case studies​

Recurring shapes in the published customer corpus, each cited to the companies that shipped it.

  • The Company Brain: a persistent store of how a specific company works, which agents read on every run and write back to as they learn.
  • The No-API Integration: operating the screens of systems that will never get an API, with computer use standing in for the integration nobody will ship.
  • Silent Failure: the failure mode that kills trust in unattended agents: the agent thinks it finished, and it did not.
  • Self-Correction Mid-Task: an agent that checks its work against reality before handing it over, and fixes what it finds.
  • The Audit Trail: citation to source as a product feature, so the human verifies instead of hunts.
  • Long-Running Work: agent runs measured in hours rather than seconds: the workload class that makes every architecture decision matter.

How to use the lexicon​

  • As a glossary. Look up a term, read the italic line, move on. The Glossary holds the flattened one-line-per-term view.
  • As an architecture course. Read the spine in order, then the primitives, then the cost levers. That sequence is the platform decision a founder actually faces.
  • As an evidence trail. The pattern pages quote real published customer stories; every number links to the official page, and Strength of Evidence explains how hard each kind of number is.

Further Reading​

  • The Index: the 256 published stories the pattern pages cite from.
  • Strength of Evidence: how to weigh the numbers quoted across this section.
  • Reference Index: the dated master list of Anthropic's published sources.
  • The Tools: the paste-in generator that applies these concepts to your product.