Glossary
40 words you'll meet on ToolVerdict, each in one plain sentence.
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- Agent
- An AI that works through a task in several steps on its own, planning, using tools and checking its work, like an assistant you send on an errand.
- Agent framework
- A code toolkit for building your own agents. It handles the steps, memory and tool use so you don't write them from scratch.
- Agent skills
- Instruction packs that teach a coding agent how to do one specific job, such as following your team's style.
- Analytics
- Tools that count your visitors and show which pages they use, like a shop's door counter plus a map of which aisles people walk.
- API
- A menu one program offers so other programs can order from it: your app sends a request and gets an answer back. Short for application programming interface.
- API key
- A secret password your app uses to prove who it is to an API, and who should be billed. Never put it in public code.
- Auth (authentication)
- Checking who someone is, usually with a sign-in. Its partner, authorization, decides what they're allowed to do.
- Backend
- The behind-the-counter part of an app that users never see: stored data, accounts and the logic that runs on a server.
- CLI / terminal
- A text window where you type commands instead of clicking buttons. CLI stands for command-line interface.
- Code editor / IDE
- The program you write code in. An IDE (integrated development environment) is an editor with extra tools, like running and debugging, built in.
- Database
- Organized storage that remembers your app's information after the page closes, like a filing cabinet you can search.
- Deploy
- Copying your app onto a server so it's live on the internet for other people.
- Domain
- Your web address, like toolverdict.dev. You rent it yearly from a domain registrar.
- Edge
- Servers spread around the world, so your app runs close to each visitor and loads faster.
- Environment variables
- Settings kept outside your code, such as API keys, so secrets aren't written into the code itself.
- Framework
- A ready-made structure for building something, so you fill in your parts instead of starting from a blank page.
- Free tier
- A no-cost plan with usage limits. You start paying only after you go past them or need more features.
- Frontend
- The part of an app people see and click: pages, buttons and forms.
- Git
- A tool that records every change to your code, so you can see what changed and go back if something breaks.
- GitHub
- A website that stores Git repositories online so people can share code, review changes and work together.
- Hosting
- Renting space on always-on computers so your app is reachable day and night. Deploying is moving your app in.
- License
- The legal rules for using a piece of code. Open-source licenses such as MIT and Apache-2.0 let you use and change it.
- LLM / model
- A large language model: an AI trained on huge amounts of text that reads and writes text. The "model" is the trained AI itself.
- MAU
- Monthly active users: how many people used your app at least once in a month. Some sign-in tools price their plans by it.
- MCP
- Model Context Protocol, an open standard for connecting AI apps to outside tools and data. Its own docs compare it to a USB-C port for AI.
- Merchant of record
- A company that legally sells to your customers on your behalf and handles things like sales tax for you.
- Monitoring
- Watching a live app for errors, slowness and outages, and alerting you when something goes wrong, like a smoke alarm.
- Observability
- Being able to see inside a running app, through logs, traces and numbers, to work out why something happened. For AI apps it includes each AI call and what it cost.
- Open source
- Code that anyone can read, use and change, under the rules of its license.
- Prompt
- The instructions or question you type to an AI.
- Prompt-to-app builder
- A website where you describe an app in plain words and AI builds a working version for you.
- Repo (repository)
- A project's folder of code together with its full history of changes, usually kept on a site like GitHub.
- Scraping
- Having a program collect information from other websites automatically, such as prices. Check each site's terms first.
- SDK
- Software development kit: ready-made code that makes it easy to use a service from your own code.
- Server
- A computer that is always on and answers requests from other computers, such as loading a web page.
- Serverless
- Hosting where the provider runs your code only when it's needed and looks after the machines for you. There are still servers; you just don't manage them.
- Token
- A small chunk of text, often part of a word, that AI models read and write. Model APIs usually charge per token.
- Transactional email
- Automatic emails your app sends because someone did something, like a sign-up confirmation, a password reset or an order receipt.
- Vibe coding
- Building software by describing what you want to an AI and steering the result, instead of writing most of the code yourself.
- Webhook
- An automatic message one service sends to your app when something happens, such as "payment succeeded".