Definition
Plain language
A chemical you add to make a reaction happen.
As stated in the literature
A substance consumed or used to drive a chemical transformation; reagent identity is one of the operational slots most commonly falsified in decoy payloads.
Also called: reagents
Why it matters: Getting this one identity wrong is enough to make an otherwise flawless set of instructions produce nothing, which is why it is a prime target for falsification.
For example, yeast is what you add to dough to make it rise — swap it for baking powder and you get something quite different.
Heard on the show
“A researcher keeps a notebook of failed experiments — "tried adding this reagent, yield dropped twelve percent" — and the next experimenter reads it before they design their next run.”Episode 078 — Training a Markdown File: When LLM Self-Improvement Borrows the Discipline of Neural Net Training