Vibecoding

Legend says some developers are 10x more productive than average.

AI pair programming is pair programming where your partner is an AI.

AI slop is low-quality AI-generated content that's been published without human review or editing.

An agentic workflow is when AI doesn't just suggest code — it actually executes a multi-step plan autonomously.

The nuclear power plant committee approved the reactor design in 2 minutes — no one understood it well enough to debate. The bike shed for employees?

Bus factor = 1 means one person leaving (or getting hit by a bus) destroys the project. They're the only one who knows how the payment system works.

CLAUDE.md is a special file you put in your project to give Claude Code persistent instructions — your project's personality file.

Claude Artifacts are the interactive code previews Claude can generate in conversation — full React components, SVG graphics, HTML pages, and more, rendere...

Code golf is a programming sport where you solve problems using the fewest characters possible. A FizzBuzz in readable Python is 10 lines.

Code Review Bingo is the game you play during code reviews where you spot classic patterns: 'TODO: fix this later' (it never gets fixed), commented-out cod...

A context window is how much text an AI can 'see' at once — its working memory.

Copypasta is copy-pasted code that gets reused everywhere — the developer's comfort food.

Cursor Rules (formerly .cursorrules) are instructions you put in your project to tell Cursor IDE how to behave — like a CLAUDE.md but for Cursor.

Cursor Tab is the AI autocomplete in Cursor IDE that predicts what you're about to type and lets you accept it with Tab.

A Friday deploy is deploying code to production on a Friday afternoon — universally considered a terrible idea.

When an AI confidently makes something up — like citing a library that doesn't exist or generating code that calls a function that was never written.

LGTM is the two-word code review approval that can mean anything from 'I carefully reviewed every line and this is perfect' to 'I glanced at the title and...

MCP is like USB for AI — a universal standard for connecting AI models to external tools and data.

A nit (short for nitpick) is a tiny, non-blocking code review comment about something that doesn't really matter but someone felt strongly enough to mentio...

One-shot prompting is giving the AI a single example of what you want, then asking it to do the same pattern for new input.

Pair programming is two people at one computer — one types (driver), one thinks strategically (navigator).

Prompt engineering is the art of talking to AI so it actually does what you want.

Prompt-driven development is writing code by writing prompts instead of code.

You've been staring at this bug for 3 hours.

Scope creep is when a simple feature request slowly grows into rebuilding the entire application.

Ship it is the developer battle cry. It means 'this is good enough, let's deploy it.

Spaghetti code is code so tangled and messy that following the logic feels like untangling earphones that have been in your pocket for a week.

Technical debt is the coding equivalent of putting things on a credit card.

Technical debt is borrowing against future development speed for current delivery.

Technical interviews test you by asking algorithmic puzzles on a whiteboard under time pressure. The theory is this correlates with job performance.

In AI-land, a token is a chunk of text — roughly 3/4 of a word.

Vibe architecture is when you let AI design your system architecture by describing what you need and letting it figure out the structure.

A vibe check in dev culture is when you step back and ask 'does this feel right?' before shipping.

Vibe coding is writing software by vibes — you describe what you want to an AI, it writes the code, and you just... vibe.

Vibe debugging is when you paste an error into an AI and let it figure out what's wrong.

Vibechecking is the informal review process for vibe-coded projects — quickly scanning AI-generated code to make sure it's not doing anything crazy.

The most dangerous phrase in software development.

A YOLO deploy is pushing code to production without testing it first because you're feeling brave (or reckless).

You want to fix a bug. The bug requires running the test suite. The test suite needs a Docker container. The Dockerfile is outdated.