The Curriculum / Reader / Jargon Glossary
LEVEL 1 · ESSENTIALS · INDIVIDUAL TRACK

Jargon Glossary

This page compiles 1 file from the repository, verbatim, in reading order. The living version: this folder on GitHub.

level-1-essentials/individual/08-jargon-glossary/learning-path.md

Jargon Learning Path

The glossary lives at ../../shared/glossary/master-glossary.md. This file tells you the order to learn it in.

The two-week sprint

11 clusters, 11 days, plus 3 review days.

Day Cluster Time
1 Model Mechanics 30 min
2 Reasoning 30 min
3 Retrieval (RAG) 45 min — this is the hardest cluster
4 Agents 45 min
5 Training 30 min
6 Multimodal 30 min
7 Evaluation 30 min
8 Deployment 30 min
9 Governance and Safety 30 min
10 Product / Ecosystem 20 min
11 Neologisms 20 min
12 REVIEW day 1 — Model Mechanics, Reasoning, Retrieval 45 min
13 REVIEW day 2 — Agents, Training, Multimodal 45 min
14 REVIEW day 3 — Eval, Deployment, Governance, Product, Neologisms 45 min

Study method that actually works

For each cluster:

  1. Read the cluster in the glossary
  2. Star terms you couldn't define confidently in one sentence
  3. Speak — for each starred term, say the definition out loud in your own words
  4. Use — write one sentence that uses the term in the context of your work
  5. Test — 24 hours later, quiz yourself with the term list (definitions hidden)

Fluency test

After 14 days, you should be able to answer these without looking:

  1. What's the difference between a context window and max tokens?
  2. When would you use RAG vs context stuffing?
  3. What does MCP stand for and what problem does it solve?
  4. What's the difference between fine-tuning and RLHF?
  5. What's a reranker and when do you need one?
  6. What's the difference between an agent and a tool?
  7. What's temperature vs top-p?
  8. What's the difference between a base model and an instruction-tuned model?
  9. Give three concrete examples of prompt injection.
  10. What's the difference between LLM-as-judge and human eval?
  11. What does zero-retention mean in a vendor contract?
  12. What's the difference between deflection and containment?
  13. What's a MoE model?
  14. What's HITL and when do you require it?
  15. What's chain-of-thought and when does it help?

If you can answer 12/15 without looking, you're fluent.

Ongoing learning

← 07 — Automation Rituals →