APPENDIX A: GLOSSARY OF TERMS AND ACRONYMS

TERMS BEGINNING WITH F Fail fast: giving up quickly when something clearly is not working, instead of wasting time on hopeless attempts. Failure mode: a recognizable way that a system can go wrong. Fairness: similar people receiving similar treatment. Fallback chain: ordered backup options. Fan-in: collecting and merging parallel results. Fan-out: splitting work into independent parallel pieces. Fan-out and fan-in: splitting a job into many parts that run side by side and then merging the results back together. Feedback loop: feeding lessons back into the system. Few-shot prompting: including a small number of examples in the prompt. Financial Operations (FinOps): the discipline of tracking and managing cloud and AI spending carefully. FinOps: the short form of Financial Operations (FinOps). Flash card: a small card with a term on one side and its meaning on the other. Framework: a ready-made toolkit that provides common building blocks so you do not have to write everything from scratch. Function: a named, reusable recipe with inputs and an output. Function calling: another name for tool calling, in which a model asks the harness to run a named function.