Definition
Plain language
Compiling something at the moment you need to use it, rather than far in advance.
As stated in the literature
Just-in-time compilation; in the Agent JIT framework, the strategy of compiling a user task into an optimized executable program at the moment the task arrives rather than running an interpreter step-by-step.
Also called: just-in-time
Why it matters: JIT compilation captures a recurring engineering pattern: pay a one-time cost to produce something fast that you'll run many times.
For example, a Java program is compiled to optimized machine code the first time each method runs, rather than translated line by line every time.
Heard on the show
“They call the whole thing the JIT compiler for agents.”Episode 063 — Why Web Agents Are Slow: A Compiler-Style Fix for Computer-Use Latency