10 AI Terms That Put You Ahead of 90% of AI Developers

A developer recounts building a chatbot for a small candle business that lied to a customer, prompting a week-long effort to learn 10 fundamental AI terms—including tokens, hallucinations, RAG, AI agents, embeddings, and context windows—in plain English. The guide aims to help beginners avoid similar mistakes by explaining how ChatGPT, Claude, LLMs, and related technologies actually work.

Member-only story 10 AI Terms That Put You Ahead of 90% of AI Developers A beginner-friendly guide to the 10 AI terms that explain how ChatGPT, Claude, LLMs, RAG, AI agents, embeddings, tokens, and context windows actually work. My chatbot lied to a customer. I built it myself, and I didn’t catch the lie until an angry email showed up. I’ve spent a lot of time building AI systems . That didn’t stop a beginner-level mistake from slipping straight past me, one that a total newcomer could have avoided if someone had just explained ten words in plain English first. Nobody explains them. Everyone assumes you already know what a token is, why an AI hallucinates, or why RAG matters more than fine-tuning. So this is the real week I spent fixing my mistake, term by term, in the order I learned each one the hard way. A friend who runs a small candle business from her kitchen table asked me to help her add a chatbot to her website. I said yes without thinking twice.