Glossary

A half-serious field guide to the jargon, acronyms, and deep cuts you'll hear thrown around at Grok. Added after one too many "wait, what does that mean?" moments at dinner.

Not exhaustive. Very biased.

Grok-specific

Grok — To deeply understand. Coined by Robert Heinlein in Stranger in a Strange Land (1961). Also the name of this conference. Also, yes, a chatbot owned by someone else — unrelated, try not to think about it.

Path — This website. A timed, linked walkthrough of the whole conference. Built on PathMX.

10/20 — The attendee-driven sessions at the heart of the unconference. You sign up to talk for either 10 or 20 minutes on whatever you want. See the 10/20 guide.

Unconference — A conference where the attendees drive most of the content instead of a fixed speaker lineup. Grok has keynotes and 10/20s — so, technically, a half-unconference.

Badge — Two things: (1) the physical card hanging around your neck with an NFC chip in it, and (2) the digital profile page it links to. Tap your badge to someone's phone to share it.

NFC — Near-field communication. The little radio chip in your badge (and your phone). Short-range, no app needed. Also how Apple Pay works.

Scribe — Attendees who volunteer to capture notes, photos, and quotes from sessions into this site. See the Scribe guide.

Group 1 / 2 / 3 — Your assigned 10/20 breakout group. Printed on your badge.

AOE — Area of expertise. The little tags on badges (DEV, DES, PRD, ENT, MKT, COA, CST, WRT) so people can find their people.

AI & agents (the current obsession)

LLM — Large language model. The thing powering ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and roughly half the conversations this week. Predicts the next token based on a lot of text it was trained on. "Just autocomplete" is both a valid critique and a massive understatement.

Agent — An LLM hooked up to tools (a browser, a terminal, an API) so it can take actions instead of just talking. The buzzword of 2026. If someone says "agentic," they mean this.

RAG — Retrieval-augmented generation. Fancy way of saying "look stuff up in a database before answering." How most AI products avoid making things up.

MCP — Model Context Protocol. Anthropic's open standard for letting AI agents talk to tools and data sources. Think of it as USB for AI.

Embedding — A chunk of text turned into a list of numbers so a computer can measure how "similar" two ideas are. José María's Friday keynote is mostly about the limits of this.

Vibe coding — Programming by describing what you want to an AI agent and accepting whatever it writes. Coined by Andrej Karpathy in 2025. Opinions vary, loudly.

Copilot — GitHub's AI pair programmer. Diana Mounter helped ship it. Also a generic term now for any AI-assisted coding tool.

Tech industry shorthand

CTO / CEO / COO / CFO — Chief Technology / Executive / Operating / Financial Officer. The C-suite.

VP — Vice president. Somewhere between a director and a C-level.

IC — Individual contributor. Someone who does the work instead of managing the people who do the work. Often said proudly.

PRD — Product requirements document. What PMs (the product kind) write before engineers build a thing.

API — Application programming interface. How one piece of software talks to another. If you've ever "integrated" anything, you touched an API.

SaaS — Software as a service. Things you rent monthly instead of buying on a CD. (Remember CDs?)

The stack — The set of technologies a product is built on. "What's your stack?" is small talk for engineers.

Design system — A shared library of buttons, colors, spacing rules, etc. so every screen looks like it's from the same product. Diana ran one at GitHub (Primer). Most companies have one; most are half-finished.

Startup exit — When a founder sells the company or takes it public. Peter Barth's Iron Yard "exit" is that.

Coworking — Shared offices you rent a desk in. Peaked around 2015. Atlaslocal is one.

Late-90s / early-2000s deep cuts

For the crowd that remembers these without needing a link:

GeoCities — Free web hosting (1994–2009) where everyone's first website lived. Neighborhoods, animated GIFs, "under construction" signs, MIDI autoplay. GifCities preserves the aesthetic.

Flash — Adobe's animation runtime that powered most of the creative web from 1998 to ~2010. Killed by iPhones. Mourned by a generation of designers.

BBS — Bulletin board system. Pre-web online communities you dialed into. If you remember these, you're probably early Gen X.

Napster — P2P music sharing, 1999–2001. How a lot of us got our MP3s. Then the lawsuits.

Webring — A chain of themed websites linking to each other. The original "algorithm." Rediscovered nostalgically every few years.

Skeuomorphism — Digital design that mimics real-world objects (leather stitching in Calendar.app, the Notes app looking like a legal pad). Ruled design from ~2007–2013, then Jony Ive killed it.

Web 2.0 — Roughly 2004–2010. Rounded corners, gradients, Ajax, user-generated content, "social." The era that made most of us employable.

The ones you're apparently supposed to know

PM — Project manager. Also, confusingly, product manager — different job, same initials. If someone at a tech conference says "PM" without context, they probably mean product, but you can usually just nod.

D&D — Dungeons & Dragons. Tabletop role-playing game. First published 1974. The kids on Stranger Things play it. If you grew up watching The Goonies you're expected to at least know the name. (No shame — now you do.)

RPG — Role-playing game. Covers everything from D&D to Final Fantasy to that one friend who's "actually still playing Skyrim."

IRL — In real life. As opposed to online, which, for our generation, used to be a meaningful distinction.