Definition
Plain language
A diagram of items connected by one-way arrows that never loop back on themselves.
As stated in the literature
Directed Acyclic Graph — a graph with directed edges and no cycles, used to represent dependency structure such as Bayesian networks, evidence graphs, and agent task flows.
Also called: directed acyclic graph
Why it matters: Its no-loops structure makes dependencies clear and lets systems process tasks in a valid order without getting stuck in circular references.
For example, a recipe's steps form one of these when chopping must come before cooking and you never circle back to an earlier step.
Heard on the show
“… They acknowledge sessions are modeled as linear loops, so anything DAG-shaped — tree-of-thoughts, multi-agent collaboration, fork-join pipelines — would need richer primitives …”Episode 016 — Why Your Coding Agent Stalls While the GPU Runs Hot