Concepts
A quick guide to terms used in our posts.
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AGENTS.md
AGENTS.md is a file that coding agents read to pick up context about a project and how to work on it, often alongside other documents like a PRD. It is a convention for giving agents instructions and background rather than a feature of any particular product.
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automation
Automation is having software perform tasks or workflows for you without doing each step by hand, such as managing a family schedule, running a small business's routine processes, or coordinating school activities. Unlike one-off tools, automation connects steps into repeatable custom workflows tailored to your needs.
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Claude Code
Claude Code is a coding agent harness you run on your computer and type into, letting an AI model write, edit, and run code for you. It's an example of the broader agent-and-harness tooling that includes things like Codex, rather than the underlying model itself.
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Codex
Codex is a coding agent tool you run on your computer to build software with AI, similar to Claude Code. It acts as a harness — the agent system you type into — and can be used to draft documents like PRDs or write code on your behalf.
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Context window
A context window is the amount of input — text or other digital information — a large language model can take in at one go. It is not the model's general memory or knowledge; it is the limit of what you can feed it in a single interaction.
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framework
A framework is a prebuilt structure of tools and conventions for a programming language that shapes how an application is put together. It differs from a library, which you call into for specific tasks, and from a protocol, which defines how systems communicate — a framework sets the overall pattern your code fits into.
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full stack
Full stack refers to building software across all layers of an application, from front end and back end to the database and deployment. It contrasts with focusing on a single layer, and it describes a breadth of work rather than a specific tool or role.
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harness
A harness is the agent system running on your computer that you type into, such as Claude Code or Codex. It is the part that reaches out to your files and does things on your computer, as opposed to the underlying language model in the cloud. In practice the terms agent and harness are often used interchangeably.
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inference provider
An inference provider is a service that runs an AI model and returns its responses to you, so you can use the model without hosting it yourself. You can generally switch between providers for the same model, comparing price and performance. An inference provider is not necessarily the company that created or trained the model.
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integrate
integrate: To connect one piece of software with another so they can share data or work together, such as an app connecting to your email, Stripe, or your e-commerce platform. A tool that integrates with these services fits into your existing setup, rather than forcing you to move data there manually.
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LLM
LLM (large language model) is an AI model trained on large amounts of text that you converse with in plain language to get outputs like written text or code. Unlike a coding agent, an LLM alone does not act on your project; you work through an agent to build software with it.
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open source
Open source refers to software whose source code is made publicly available, allowing anyone to view, use, modify, and share it. This differs from proprietary software, which keeps its code closed. In the excerpt, open source projects are mentioned as places where the speaker participated early in their career.
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prompt
prompt: The instructions or request you write for a coding agent to guide what it builds or changes in your project. The prompt is how you communicate intent to the agent, shaping the output it produces.
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SaaS
SaaS (Software as a Service) is software delivered over the internet on a subscription basis, hosted and maintained by the provider rather than installed on your own machines. Unlike traditional purchased software you own and run yourself, SaaS is typically a one-size-fits-all product shared across many customers, which can make it less tailored to niche or highly customized needs.
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token
A token is a unit of text that a coding model reads and writes when processing your prompts and code. Coding agents charge by the token, so using them costs money — though the excerpts note prices have dropped sharply as many providers compete to offer cheaper, higher-performing tokens.
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