Why this matters: AI tools are now part of the daily workflow for most developers. Whether you're writing prompts for GitHub Copilot, building RAG pipelines, or presenting AI features to stakeholders — you need precise English to work effectively with and around AI systems.

Useful language for AI discussions

Describing prompts

  • "The prompt specifies the role and constrains the output format."
  • "Zero-shot means no examples are provided in the prompt."
  • "I used chain-of-thought prompting to improve reasoning."
  • "The system prompt sets the assistant's persona."

Evaluating outputs

  • "The model hallucinated several facts here."
  • "The output lacks grounding — there's no source for this claim."
  • "The response is coherent but not relevant to the question."
  • "Increasing the temperature makes outputs more creative but less reliable."

Discussing AI systems

  • "We use RAG — retrieval-augmented generation — to ground responses in our docs."
  • "The context window limits how much we can pass to the model."
  • "We're fine-tuning on domain-specific data to improve accuracy."
  • "Embeddings are vector representations of text for semantic search."