---
title: "Glossary"
description: "Definitions of agent environment terminology."
url: "https://www.promigence.ai/glossary"
site: "Promigence"
---

# Glossary of agent environment terminology

## Environment runtime

An environment runtime is infrastructure that builds, verifies, reproduces and forks the environment an AI agent runs inside, treating the environment itself as the product.

Full entry: https://www.promigence.ai/glossary/environment-runtime

## Verified environment

A verified environment is one that ran its own declared test command at build time, so it is known to work before an agent is placed inside it.

Full entry: https://www.promigence.ai/glossary/verified-environment

## Episode

An episode is one environment's complete life, fork, execute, terminate, and it is the unit a quote and a spend cap are written against.

Full entry: https://www.promigence.ai/glossary/episode

## Snapshot fork

A snapshot fork creates a new environment from an already-warm one that has finished installing and building, so it costs milliseconds rather than seconds.

Full entry: https://www.promigence.ai/glossary/snapshot-fork

## Warm start

A warm start begins work in an environment where dependencies are installed and caches are populated, so the first command you run is the one you care about.

Full entry: https://www.promigence.ai/glossary/warm-start

## Validity report

A validity report states, for one run, how many environments were verified, which failed, and whether each failure belonged to the environment or the task.

Full entry: https://www.promigence.ai/glossary/validity-report

## Poisoned reward

A poisoned reward is a training signal produced by a broken environment rather than by the agent's behaviour, so the model learns from an outcome that never happened.

Full entry: https://www.promigence.ai/glossary/poisoned-reward

## Burst capacity

Burst capacity is how many environments a provider actually delivers when many are requested at once, which is often very different from its advertised latency for one.

Full entry: https://www.promigence.ai/glossary/burst-capacity

## Flight recorder

A flight recorder is a per-episode log of every command executed and every file diff produced, kept so a failed episode can be read rather than guessed at.

Full entry: https://www.promigence.ai/glossary/flight-recorder