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AI Made Crystal Clear · chapter 1: The AI Moment, and Why the Words Matter

The terminology fog

2026-08-27

The trouble is not that AI vocabulary is hard. It is that the same words are used with different meanings, confidently, by people who never notice the mismatch. Take the single most confusing term in the whole field: agent. Put five people in a meeting where that word comes up once, and watch what each of them actually hears.

Figure 1.1: The terminology fog. The same word lands five different ways, nobody flags the mismatch, and the meeting "agrees" on five different things.
Figure 1.1: The terminology fog. The same word lands five different ways, nobody flags the mismatch, and the meeting "agrees" on five different things.

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Every chapter opens with the gist, draws the hard ideas, and ends with recipes and sources.

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