Glossary

The words and phrasing that show up again and again in AI-generated text.

The feeling that spending so much time reading and interacting with AI is shaping your language, attention, and habits of thinking.

Tells the AI what must be true about the system when it writes the code and builds the software.

An artifact that co-exists with the code in the repository and provides a living home for human judgement and context of the system.

The method that connects design and judgement with instantiating your system through AI agents.

Coding the old-fashioned way. Kari thinks it sounds like coding by hand is like churning butter.

Like fangirl. But BEAST.

To openly and wholeheartedly express excitement and recognition for someone’s skills, work, accomplishments, or just the way they are, so they can see themselves the way you see them. Fangirl fiercely: fierce does not have to mean loud or public; it means enthusiastic and wholehearted.

Design work required to make systems resilient to weird failure modes regardless of their root cause.

A fully automated facility requiring no human operators, thus no need for lights.

The system-of-systems that has to all work together to produce an outcome. If you have to perform some sort of "integration activity", you're adding a piece into a megasystem.

The operational grey zone between the happy path and defined exception path where human beings absorb process variance invisibly. Where products go to die.