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AI Tools & Productivity Glossary

Foundational to advanced terms across AI coding assistants, chat tools, image/video/audio AI, agent protocols, and local LLM runtimes

  • AI Coding Assistant - A developer tool powered by an LLM that suggests, writes, edits, and reviews code in your editor.
  • Prompt - The text input you send to an AI model: question, instruction, or context that produces a response.
  • Token - The atomic unit a language model reads and writes - usually a sub-word piece used for pricing and limits.
  • Context Window - Maximum tokens an LLM can consider in one request: prompt, history, files, and response combined.
  • API Key - A secret string that authenticates your requests to an AI provider for billing and rate limiting.
  • Rate Limit - A cap on requests/tokens per minute or concurrent requests enforced per key and tier.
  • Pricing Tier - Consumer products bundle as Free/Pro/Max/Enterprise; APIs bill pay-as-you-go per token.
  • Hallucination - When an LLM confidently produces output that is wrong, fabricated, or unsupported by sources.
  • System Prompt - A high-priority instruction block before user messages that sets persona, rules, and format.
  • ChatGPT - OpenAI's consumer chat product (Nov 2022), built on the GPT family of models.
  • Claude.ai - Anthropic's consumer chat product running the Claude family (Haiku, Sonnet, Opus).
  • Gemini - Google's family of natively multimodal models, available in app, API, Workspace, and Android.
  • GitHub Copilot - GitHub's AI coding assistant (2021): inline completion, chat, agent mode, PR review across editors.
  • Cursor - A VS Code-based AI editor (Anysphere) with multi-file editing, codebase indexing, and Composer agent.
  • Claude Code - Anthropic's agentic coding tool that runs in terminal, IDE, and web; reads code, edits, runs commands.
  • Agentic Loop - The cycle an AI agent runs: think, pick a tool, observe the result, decide whether to continue.
  • IDE - The editor where you write code: VS Code, JetBrains, Vim/Neovim, Emacs, Xcode, Visual Studio.
  • VS Code - Microsoft's free cross-platform code editor; the most common host for AI coding extensions.
  • CLI Tool - Software run from a terminal: Claude Code CLI, Aider, Gemini CLI, GitHub CLI, Codex CLI.
  • GitHub CLI - The official `gh` command for GitHub: create PRs, comment, view CI (continuous integration), all from the terminal.
  • Pull Request - A proposal to merge one branch into another, reviewed in the forge UI before acceptance.
  • Local Model - An LLM you run on your own hardware via Ollama, LM Studio, or llama.cpp instead of the cloud.
  • Open-Source Model - An LLM whose weights are publicly downloadable: Llama, Qwen, DeepSeek, Mistral, Gemma, Phi.