Origins
Buzzwords that graduated
Every hype cycle produces buzzwords that get repeated until they lose all meaning. Product directors hear "MCP" on a podcast and want you to use it to "orchestrate all our APIs into one." Marketing teams rebrand solved problems as breakthroughs. The confusion is real, and this site exists to cut through it.
But we keep these historical entries around as a reminder to stay humble. Every generation of tech has had its "X is just Y" moment — and sometimes the people who were right about the primitives turned out to be completely wrong about what mattered. AI is a genuinely transformational technology. This site was built with it.
"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS..."
— BrandonM on Hacker News (opens in a new tab), commenting on Dropbox's Y Combinator demo (item 8863 (opens in a new tab))
BrandonM was right about the primitives. Dropbox was worth $12 billion at IPO. Drew Houston resurfaced this comment eleven years later. Knowing what something is made of doesn't tell you whether it matters.
The graduated buzzwords
- Dockercgroups + namespaces + union filesystem
Docker is just cgroups and namespaces with a nice CLI and extra steps
- Dropboxrsync + inotify + cloud storage
Dropbox is just rsync with a GUI and extra steps
- Kubernetes K8scontrol loop + declarative config + container orchestration
Kubernetes is just a reconciliation loop watching YAML files with extra steps
- Serverless FaaS · Functions as a Service · Lambda Functionsprocess isolation + event-driven invocation + managed infrastructure
Serverless is just someone else's server with process isolation and extra steps
Some of today's AI buzzwords will graduate too. Others will quietly disappear once the hype fades. Understanding the primitives won't tell you which is which — but it will help you have better conversations about it while we all figure it out together.