If you know, you know.
Every shirt in the Prompt Box Line is a concept. Here's the vocabulary — what the terms mean in plain English, and what they mean to the people who've lived them.
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FEW-SHOT
Giving an AI model a small number of examples to teach it what you want, instead of writing a full specification.
→ See the Few-Shot Tee in Prompt Box LineThe term comes from machine learning: "few-shot learning" means a model generalizes from just a handful of examples. In practice it means you paste three examples into the prompt and hope it extrapolates correctly. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it generates twelve variations of your worst example. The shirt exists because the concept is real and there's no shorter way to say it.
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HALLUCINATION
When an AI model confidently generates something that is wrong — a citation that doesn't exist, a fact it invented, code that can't run.
→ See the Hallucination Tee in Prompt Box LineThe word was borrowed from psychology and it's accurate in a way that should unsettle you more than it does. The model doesn't know it's hallucinating. It delivers the fabrication at the same confidence level as correct output. You've learned to spot it. You've probably been burned by it. The shirt is for the day you got burned the hardest.
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SPEC
A specification — the written description of what a system or feature is supposed to do, before anyone builds it.
→ See the Spec Tee in Prompt Box LineIn AI-native work, the spec is simultaneously everything and nothing. It's everything because the model needs one to do anything useful. It's nothing because the model will interpret it in ways you didn't anticipate and you'll spend more time updating the spec than you would have spent doing the work. The shirt is for everyone who has typed "per the spec" into a chat window they knew would ignore them.
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GLUE WORK
The invisible coordination work — the emails, the clarifying questions, the handoffs — that keeps a project moving but never shows up in the output.
→ See the Glue Work Tee in Prompt Box LineAI didn't create glue work but it multiplied it. Every model output that almost answers the question creates two follow-ups. Every pipeline step that needs a human to review the output before it goes to the next step is glue work. The people doing it are essential and unacknowledged in equal measure. This shirt is for them.
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EDGE CASE
An input or condition that falls outside the normal expected range — the thing your system wasn't designed for, which users immediately find.
→ See the Edge Case Tee in Prompt Box LineWith AI systems, the edge case surface is essentially infinite. Every variation of natural language is a potential edge case. Every user who asks the question sideways is finding one. You can't enumerate them all in testing. The shirt is for the 2am Slack message that started with "this is probably nothing but..."
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STANDUP
A daily team meeting, originally meant to be brief, where everyone reports what they did yesterday, what they're doing today, and what's blocking them.
→ See the Standup Tee in Prompt Box LineIn AI-native teams, standup has a particular texture. "Yesterday I prompted. Today I'm prompting. Blocked by: the model keeps doing the thing I told it not to do." The ceremony persists. The content has mutated. The shirt exists because the absurdity is worth documenting while we're still living in it.
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CONTEXT WINDOW
The maximum amount of text a language model can "see" at once — the limit on how much context it can use to answer your question.
→ See the Context Window Tee in Prompt Box LineThe context window is the invisible fence of AI work. You don't notice it until you hit it. Then your carefully constructed multi-step prompt gets truncated, the model forgets what it said three exchanges ago, and you're manually managing memory for a system that was supposed to eliminate that. The numbers keep going up. The friction keeps finding you anyway.
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POLISH
The final layer of work on something — fixing the small things, smoothing the rough edges, making it feel finished instead of just done.
→ See the Polish Tee in Prompt Box LineAI is very good at "done." It is consistently bad at "finished." The output is 80% there immediately, and then you spend four times as long on the remaining 20% as you would have if you'd started from scratch. Polish is the word teams say when they mean "we still have to do the actual work." The shirt is for sprint review day.
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SIGNAL
The meaningful information in a dataset or output — as opposed to noise, which is the meaningless variation you have to filter through to find it.
→ See the Signal Tee in Prompt Box LineIn a world where AI can generate unlimited output, signal becomes the scarce resource. Anyone can produce volume. The job now is finding the one thing in the hundred outputs that was actually right — the insight, the working prototype, the sentence that captured it. Signal is what you're mining for. The shirt is for everyone who's spent a week panning for it.
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ITERATION
One pass through the cycle of trying something, seeing what happened, adjusting, and trying again.
→ See the Iteration Tee in Prompt Box LineThe headline says we're on prompt seventeen. That's what iteration looks like when the interface is natural language and the feedback loop is faster than your ability to think. You iterate more than you used to. You also understand less about why the thing finally worked than you did when you were doing it by hand. The shirt is for the people who've made peace with that. Mostly.