You've heard these words at work, at dinner parties, in your group chat. You smiled and nodded. You had no idea what they meant. We're here to help.
Overheard at a bar in Hayes Valley, 11:47 PM:
If you understood less than half of that conversation, this guide is for you.
The AI generation has developed its own vocabulary — borrowed from the tech they grew up on — and it's spreading fast. We compiled the 35 terms you're most likely to encounter in the wild, with real examples of how they're used. Consider this your survival guide.
verb
Breaking up what should be a single message into 47 tiny texts sent in rapid succession. Each text is two to five words long. Drives everyone insane.
verb
Confidently stating something you have absolutely no basis to claim. Different from lying — a hallucinator genuinely believes their own bullshit, or at least acts like they do.
noun
The brief period after a major life event (breakup, layoff, bad haircut) during which your friends are still willing to hear you talk about it. Overstaying your context window is a serious social violation.
verb
Making plans through increasingly vague, noncommittal texts until something spontaneously materializes. No one explicitly suggests anything; the plan just emerges from the ether.
verb
Subtly adjusting your personality, opinions, and vocabulary depending on who you're talking to. Not code-switching — fine-tuning is smaller and more unconscious. Everyone does it, but some people are terrifyingly good at it.
adjective
Operating at the absolute minimum resolution of a human personality. Someone who's quantized is technically present and functional, but with no richness, no flair, no unnecessary detail. A man reduced to his lowest viable bitrate.
noun
When everyone in a group reaches consensus without any passive-aggression, follow-up polls, or someone quietly fuming in the background. Essentially mythical.
verb
Convincing someone to abandon their self-imposed rules — the diet, the dry month, the 10 PM bedtime, the no-texting-the-ex pact. Usually accomplished through peer pressure disguised as enthusiasm.
noun
Someone's current level of volatility and unpredictability. Low temperature = boring and safe. High temperature = might quit their job at dinner, might propose, might fight a stranger. You never know.
noun · acronym
Real Life Hot Friend. The person in your circle who is unreasonably attractive and also genuinely kind about it. They somehow make everyone feel comfortable rather than insecure. Every group has exactly one.
noun
The act of reading way, way too much into a tiny piece of information. A single-word text, a 3-minute delay in responding, the removal of an emoji from a bio. Inference is the art of building a conspiracy theory from a period at the end of a message.
noun
Compressing a long, complicated situation into the absolute minimum viable explanation. Useful at parties. Dangerous in therapy.
noun
An extravagantly long, emotionally unhinged text message sent after midnight. Usually to an ex or a crush. Characterized by multiple paragraphs, zero paragraph breaks, at least one "and another thing," and immediate regret come morning.
noun
A shorter, more controlled version of an opus. Still emotional, but edited. Fits on one screen. Implies you have some self-respect left.
noun
The absolute minimum-effort text response. Three to five words that technically constitute a reply but communicate nothing. The conversational equivalent of a shrug.
noun · verb
Pulling up old receipts mid-argument. Screenshots, texts from 2019, that one Instagram story they forgot they posted. RAG stands for Retrieval-Augmented Grudge. You don't just remember — you cite your sources.
noun
The delicate art of crafting a text message designed to produce a very specific response. Every word is chosen. The punctuation is intentional. The emoji placement is strategic. It's manipulation but with plausible deniability.
noun
The unwritten, unspoken rules governing a friend group or social situation. Everyone knows them. Nobody put them there. If you have to ask what the system prompt is, you're already violating it.
noun · adjective
The highest possible compliment for someone's abilities — implying they operate on a level that's almost unbelievable. But there's a catch: calling someone "mythos" always carries a faint undercurrent of doubt. Are they actually that good, or is the legend outrunning the reality? Nobody's been allowed to verify. The capabilities are reported, not observed.
verb
Aggressively scrolling through someone's social media history far beyond what's socially acceptable. Regular stalking ends at last month. DeepSeeking goes to 2017. You will find the prom photos. You will regret it.
verb
Optimizing exclusively for metrics that look impressive on paper while completely ignoring whether you're actually good at the thing. Benchmaxxers have perfect resumes, perfect LinkedIn presence, perfect interview scores — and then ship absolutely nothing once hired. The gap between their stats and their reality is the benchmaxxing gap.
verb
Completely reshaping your personality, hobbies, and interests around one specific person you're trying to impress. You become exactly what they want — until they leave and you realize you don't know who you are anymore.
noun
An elaborate, unbreakable set of personal rules someone has written for themselves and laminated. Workout schedules, morning routines, relationship boundaries, diet protocols — all documented in excessive detail and shared with no one who asked. A person who "runs on Claude Code" is operating from a private internal constitution they wrote at 4 AM during a manic episode and now treat as sacred law.
verb
When a minor, containable interaction rapidly escalates into something much bigger and more intense than anyone intended. A joke becomes an argument becomes a public scene becomes a group chat meltdown.
noun · adjective
Someone who is confidently, aggressively mid. They try hard, they show up, they produce volume — but the quality is just not there, and they can't tell. A llama will rewrite your entire doc unprompted and somehow make it worse. Their energy-to-output ratio is baffling. Open about their limitations in theory but incapable of recognizing them in practice.
noun
Content, conversation, or effort that is technically present but has zero substance. It looks like something from a distance, but up close it's hollow. LinkedIn posts, networking small talk, and "thoughts and prayers" are all slop.
noun
The friend who disappears for 45 minutes, says nothing, then resurfaces having solved the entire problem nobody asked them to solve. Didn't consult. Didn't ask permission. Just did it. You'll find out when you get the calendar invite, the shared doc, and the Venmo request simultaneously. Devins are either the backbone of your friend group or a menace. There is no in between.
noun
A group project where everyone is brilliant at one specific thing and useless at everything else. Together you're unstoppable. Individually you'd starve.
noun · acronym
Artificial General Intelligence. A person who is suspiciously competent at too many unrelated things. They cook, they code, they play jazz piano, they speak three languages. Nobody trusts them because it doesn't seem possible. Something must be wrong with them. There's always a catch with AGI people — usually it's emotional availability.
noun · acronym
Girl who's Perpetually Texting. Someone who is physically present but mentally in seven different conversations on their phone. They're nodding at you but their thumbs haven't stopped moving. You could catch fire and they'd double-tap it.
noun · acronym
Group Relative Policy Optimization. The process of watching what everyone else in the group does before deciding your own move. You don't form an opinion until you've surveyed the room. Not indecisive — strategic. You optimize relative to the group. The person who says "I'm easy, whatever you all want" but then vetoes anything that isn't what they secretly wanted? GRPO master.
verb
Finding the exact minimum effort required to get maximum praise, validation, or credit. Not doing the work — doing the specific 3% of the work that gets noticed. Reward hackers know exactly which Slack messages to send, which meetings to speak in, and which emails to CC the boss on. The rest of the time they're watching YouTube.
noun
A passive-aggressive text that ends a conversation with aggression but without closure — like a claw left open, hanging in the air. The sender drops something devastating and then goes silent. No resolution offered. No question asked. Just the claw, extended. You can respond but you'll just be grabbing at air.
If you've ever heard someone say "that was very 4o of you" and been lost, here's the breakdown. Gen AI slang has a versioning system. The number and suffix after a word changes its meaning — sometimes subtly, sometimes drastically.
The "o" stands for "omni" in the slang (whether or not that's the real etymology). A GPT-4o person is someone who's everywhere, all the time. Every event, every group chat, every Slack workspace. They're omnipresent but never quite the main character anywhere. You've seen them at the Stripe AI meetup, at the Cognition demo day, at some random hackathon in Oakland — always in the background, never hosting. Reliable but eerie.
Want more?
30 bonus examples of Gen AI slang overheard in the wild — group chats, coffee shops, company offsites, and one best man speech.
Read Bonus Examples →Want your AI assistant to use Gen AI slang? Drop this into your system prompt, AGENTS.md, or custom instructions. Copy it below or download the file.