Guide

AI Glossary

Plain definitions of the terms that come up when a team starts building with AI. Each one opens with the definition, says what the thing is actually for, and is honest about what it does not solve.

1 min read Updated August 29, 2026

Terms

  • Retrieval Augmented Generation: Retrieval augmented generation, or RAG, is a technique that searches your own content at the moment a question is asked and puts…
  • AI Agent: An AI agent is a system that works out which steps to take toward a goal and carries them out by calling…
  • Fine-Tuning: Fine-tuning continues training an existing model on examples of the behaviour you want, adjusting its weights. It is how you teach a…
  • AI Copilot: An AI copilot is an assistant built into software somebody is already using, which understands what they are working on and suggests…
  • MLOps: MLOps is the practice of getting machine learning models into production and keeping them working there: deployment, monitoring, retraining and versioning. It…

Why these five

They are the terms that most often mean different things to different people in the same meeting. Getting them straight early saves a surprising amount of argument later, particularly the difference between retrieval and training, which decides how a system is built rather than how it is described.

Who writes these

The engineers who build the systems these terms describe. If a definition here disagrees with a vendor’s, it is because we have had to make the thing work in production. More about KoderTal.

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