# Golden Path

Source: https://customlabs.io/glossary/golden-path/
Updated: 2026-09-13

Agents

# Golden Path

A golden path is the single sanctioned way to do a common piece of work.

It is the default harness, sandbox, and repo conventions a team starts from, not one assembled from scratch.

It only earns the name if it is the easiest way to get the work done, rather than merely the mandated one.

A slower sanctioned path is exactly what drives people onto an unsanctioned workaround instead.

Whether one exists before the second team onboards predicts whether an agent rollout survives past its pilot.

[The Agent Adoption Playbook](https://customlabs.io/adoption/)

[← Back to the full glossary](https://customlabs.io/glossary/)

## Related terms

[Shadow AI Shadow AI is a model or tool used without going through the sanctioned path.](https://customlabs.io/glossary/shadow-ai/)[Acceptance Rate Acceptance rate is the share of an agent's proposed changes a human reviewer approves.](https://customlabs.io/glossary/acceptance-rate/)

## More in Agents

[Agent (Agentic AI) An agent is an LLM given a loop, memory, and tools it can call.](https://customlabs.io/glossary/agent/)[Tool Calling Tool calling lets a model request a structured action instead of only generating text.](https://customlabs.io/glossary/tool-calling/)[Model Context Protocol (MCP) MCP is an open standard for connecting LLM applications to tools and data sources.](https://customlabs.io/glossary/model-context-protocol/)[Context Engineering Context engineering decides what occupies a model's context window at every step, and in what order.](https://customlabs.io/glossary/context-engineering/)