Cheat sheet: Working with an agent

The 39 terms of this lesson, part by part, with the French word a team in France would use.

1. What the agent knows

AI agentagent d'IA: a program that reads and writes a project's files and runs commands, following your requests in a chat.
Modelmodèle: the AI inside an agent that reads text and writes a reply, such as Gemini or Claude.
Promptconsigne, prompt: a request or an instruction that you type for the agent.
Contextcontexte: all the text the model can see when it answers, such as your messages and the files it has read.
Instructions filefichier d'instructions: a file in the project, such as AGENTS.md, with rules the agent reads before each task.
Secretsecret: a value that must stay private because it gives access to an account, such as a password or a key.

Repositorydépôt: the project's folder, also called a repo, with all its files and the history of every saved change.
File treearborescence de fichiers: the project's folders and files, shown one inside the other as in a file explorer.
Tool useutilisation d'outils: the way an agent acts, by asking the editor to read a file, edit it or run a command.
System promptprompt système: hidden instructions from the company that makes the agent, which the model reads before yours.
Terminalterminal: a window where you control the computer by typing text commands.
Commandcommande: a line of text typed in the terminal that tells the computer to do something, such as npm install.
Frameworkframework: ready-made code, such as React, Vue or Svelte, that redraws the screen from the state automatically.
Dependencydépendance: code written by other people that a project uses, and that must be updated regularly.

Plan modemode plan: a setting in which the agent can read the project and propose a plan, without changing any file.
Librarybibliothèque: ready-made code, written by others, that does one job, such as showing a gallery of photos.
Commitcommit: a saved version of the project, with a short message that says what changed and why.
Revertannuler un commit: to cancel a change by returning the project to the commit saved before it.

Diffdiff: a view of a change that shows the removed lines in red and the added lines in green.
Previewaperçu: a version of the site that runs on your computer or at a private link, so you can try it before visitors do.
Dev serverserveur de développement: a small program that shows the site in your browser and reloads it each time a file changes.
Localhostlocalhost: the name a computer gives itself, so an address such as localhost:5173 opens only on that computer.
Automated testtest automatisé: a small program that checks that code gives the right results, run again after every change.
Lintlint: a check that reads the code and lists common mistakes, without running it.
Consoleconsole: the panel of the developer tools that shows the errors and messages of a page's scripts.

Bugbug: a mistake in code that makes a program do the wrong thing.
Error messagemessage d'erreur: the text the console shows when a script fails, with the type of error, what failed, and the file and line.
Stack tracestack trace: the list of functions that were running when an error happened, shown under the error message.
Buildbuild, compilation: the step that turns the project's code into the files a browser can run.
Agent sessionsession: one conversation with an agent, which starts with an empty context.

Hallucinationhallucination: a false fact that an AI states with confidence, such as the name of a package that doesn't exist.
Packagepackage, paquet: a ready-made piece of code, with a name and a version number, that a project downloads.
Versionversion: one numbered release of a package or a tool, such as 5.2.1, where higher numbers are newer.
Context windowfenêtre de contexte: the largest amount of text that a model can see at once, measured in tokens.
Tokenjeton, token: a small piece of text, often part of a word, which a model reads and writes one at a time.

API keyclé d'API: a code that identifies a site to an outside service; a secret key must stay on a server, never in the page.
Environment variablevariable d'environnement: a value, such as a key, that the code reads from the computer it runs on.
.env filefichier .env: a file on your computer that holds the project's environment variables and must never be committed.
Personal datadonnées personnelles: any information about a person who can be identified, such as a name or an email address.

Web Technologies · Talking shop · wt.thomasjuldo.com/course/talking-shop/working-with-an-agent