This is a dictionary, not a reading assignment. People talk about this stuff like it's complicated — it isn't. Skim these once so nothing surprises you later, then come back whenever a word stumps you. If it's not on this page, you can safely ignore it.
The building blocks
What the tools and their parts are called. Learn these and you can follow almost any conversation.
Coding agent
An AI you hire for a task: you describe the job, it does the work — opens your files, makes the changes — and you check the result. Codex and Claude Code are the two big ones.
Prompt
The thing you type — your request, in your own words. "Writing a good prompt" just means describing what you want clearly, same as a clear email.
Model
The AI "brain" doing the thinking, like GPT or Claude. Newer usually means smarter. Articles call these LLMs — same thing.
Terminal
A plain text window where you type instead of click. Looks serious, isn't — you'll only ever need a tiny bit of it. Also called the command line; a "CLI" is just the terminal version of a tool.
IDE
A browser for your files — like Chrome, but it shows what's on your computer instead of websites. VS Code is the famous one. Most people run their coding agent inside one, and it's the easier of the two windows to start in.
Words you'll meet while working
These show up once you start using an agent. None of them are deep.
Folder ("directory," "project")
The place on your computer where your stuff for a task lives. Agents work on a folder you point them at — "open your project" means the same thing.
Hallucination
When AI confidently makes something up. It happens — which is why the one habit that matters is checking the result. Agents make that easy by showing exactly what they did.
Script
A small program — a saved recipe of steps. "It wrote me a script" means "it made a little tool that does this task automatically from now on."
Automation
Basically a script that runs itself — on a schedule, or whenever something happens. "Every Monday at 9, build the report" is an automation. You set it up once and the task stops being yours.
Token
How AI measures text — roughly, pieces of words. Only matters because plans have limits: "out of tokens" just means "you've used your allowance for now."
Context window
The AI's working memory — how much it can keep in mind at once. In very long sessions the oldest parts fall out of view, so start fresh for a fresh task.
Diff
A before-and-after view of changes, differences highlighted. Agents show you these so you can approve or reject their work — it's your main checking tool.
Bug
A mistake that makes a program behave wrong. Debugging is fixing it — with an agent, that's mostly saying "this isn't working, here's what it's doing."
Words you'll hear in the wild
Headlines and coworkers love these. Here's what they actually mean.
Agentic
The adjective form of "agent" — "agentic AI" is in every headline. AI that takes actions to reach a goal, instead of only answering questions.
Vibe coding
The buzzword for exactly what this site teaches: describing what you want in plain English and letting the AI write the code. You already know what it means.
Chatbot
An AI you converse with — ChatGPT and the Claude app. You ask, it answers, you do the work. Chatbot vs. coding agent is directions vs. a driver.
Git & GitHub
Git saves a history of every change so any version is recoverable; GitHub is the website where that work is stored and shared. Not needed on day one — when your agent "commits" something, it's saving a checkpoint you can roll back to.
Open source
Software whose inner workings are public — free to use, inspect, and improve. Part of why this world moves so fast.
API
How two programs talk to each other directly, no human clicking. "It connects to the API" = "my tool can pull from or send to that service automatically."