Tech's oldest bug: naming. Seeing the debate about the definition of RAG or Agents reminds me of Martin Fowler's "semantic diffusion" from 2006. He coined this for ideas or terms whose meaning gets diluted over time. Today's RAG, Agents, Vibe coding, RL, or AGI join a long list of past software terms like Agile, Serverless, Microservices, DevOps, and more. The pattern is always the same. Someone comes up with a term to describe something genuinely new and useful. It catches on because it solves real problems. Then everyone gets a hold of it, stretches it beyond recognition, and suddenly everyone's saying the same buzzword but nobody's talking about the same thing. In today's world with AI, everything is moving faster. Including how quickly we ruin perfectly good words.
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