From A to Z
13 terms
Agentic coding
Agentic coding means giving an AI agent a task and letting it work through the steps itself: reading code, running tools, editing files and checking the result, instead of suggesting one snippet at a time.
AI Coding Agent
An AI coding agent is a program, driven by a large language model (LLM), that works on your code for you instead of only suggesting it. It reads files, runs commands, edits code and checks the result, repeating until the task is done.
AST editing
AST editing means changing code by its structure, such as a named function or class, instead of by finding and replacing text. The tool parses the file into an abstract syntax tree (AST), changes the right node, and writes the file back out.
Code dependency graph
A code dependency graph is a map of which parts of your code rely on which other parts. Each point is a file, function or type, and each arrow means "uses", such as an import, a call or a reference, so you can see what affects what.
Code intelligence
Code intelligence is a tool's ability to understand code as a program rather than as plain text. It knows where each symbol is defined, who uses it, what type it has and what it depends on, which powers features like go-to-definition, find references, rename and error checking.
Context compaction
Context compaction is how an AI coding agent keeps a long session within the model's memory limit: it shrinks older messages into a short summary and keeps recent ones as they are. The context window is the amount of text a model can read at once, so compaction lets work continue without losing the thread.
Semantic code search
Semantic code search finds code by what it means and how it is connected, not by matching text. A query like "who calls fetchUser?" returns the real callers instead of every line where those characters appear.
Symbol editing vs string editing
Symbol editing changes code by naming the thing to change, such as a function or class, while string editing finds a piece of text and replaces it. Symbol edits are tied to the code's structure; string edits are tied to exact characters.