# The AI Phrasebook

*Agentic*: bash.

*Function calling*: RPC.

*Agent handoff*: a pipe.

*MCP*: CGI.

*Skills*: markdown.

*Multi-agent orchestration*: systemd.

*Autonomous agent*: cron.

*Computer use*: ssh.

*System prompt*: `.env`.

*World model*: `/etc`.

*Context window*: scrollback.

*Short-term memory*: Redis.

*Long-term memory*: Postgres.

*Embeddings*: grep.

*Distillation*: ripgrep.

*Retrieval augmentation*: `locate(1)`.

*Cross-attention*: a JOIN.

*Chain of thought*: `~/.bash_history`.

*Summarisation*: `git rebase -i`.

*Speculative decoding*: tab completion.

*Symbolic reasoning*: regex.

*Code interpreter*: awk.

*Structured output*: ASN.1.

*Model card*: a man page.

*LoRA*: patch.

*Evals*: CI.

*Pelican on a bicycle*: fizzbuzz.

*Mixture of experts*: HAProxy.

*Hallucination*: a 404 page served as a 200.

*Refusal*: `/dev/null`.

*Reflection*: `set -x`.

*ReAct*: retry with backoff and a print statement.

*Recursive self-improvement*: a fork bomb.

*Interpretability*: EXPLAIN ANALYZE.

*Mechanistic interpretability*: strace.

*Guardrails*: ulimit.

*Jailbreak*: sudo.

*Prompt injection*: LD_PRELOAD.

*Off switch*: SIGKILL.

*Human in the loop*: `[y/N]`.

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By Andrew Nesbitt (https://nesbitt.io). Markdown version of https://nesbitt.io/2026/07/31/the-ai-phrasebook.html