Agent Scaffolding

Agent scaffolding is the surrounding infrastructure and code that wraps an AI model to give it agentic capabilities, including the loop that calls tools, manages context, handles errors, and decides when to stop.

Scaffolding sits between the raw model and the task, and is where most runtime governance controls, policy enforcement, logging, credential injection, are applied.

Closely related concepts include Policy Enforcement Point, Agent Context Isolation, Agent Middleware, Jailbreak (AI Agent). Each is defined in the Prefactor glossary.