The AI Coding Dictionary: Clarifying Tokens, Inference, and Agent Boundaries
luisdans · x · 2026-07-30
The 'AI Coding Dictionary' compiles core terminology in the AI coding space, helping developers understand how LLMs work and their engineering boundaries in plain English.
Key concepts clarified include:
- AI: A moving label pointing at whatever computers can newly, impressively do — right now, large language models.
- Harness: Everything around the model that turns it into an agent: tools, system prompts, context-window management, permissions, etc.
- Model: Just the parameters. Stateless, doing next-token prediction and nothing else. Cannot do anything agentic on its own.
- Inference: Running a trained model to generate output, where parameters stay fixed.
- Prefix cache: The provider-side store that lets consecutive requests skip re-processing a shared prefix, billing those tokens at a lower rate.
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