Hallucinating
"He told the entire all-hands he shipped the feature. It's not even in staging. The man is hallucinating in front of 200 people and nobody is stopping him."
— overheard at a Philz on 3rd St, referring to someone at a Series C startup
Hallucinating
"She told Hinge she's 'fluent in French.' She took AP French in 2014 and got a 3. Hallucinating on her own profile."
— group chat, four people from the same Anthropic onboarding cohort
Context Window
"Bro got laid off from Meta eight months ago and still introduces himself as 'ex-Meta.' Your context window is closed. You work at a seed-stage startup now. Own it."
— overheard at a rooftop happy hour in SoMa
Opus
"She sent the opus and then immediately texted 'omg ignore that.' Girl. It's seventeen paragraphs. I can't un-read it. The opus has been received."
— screenshotted from a Signal group called "down bad support group"
Opus
"My ex sent me an opus on LinkedIn. LINKEDIN. Said he 'admires my professional trajectory' and 'values our connection.' It's a love letter dressed in business casual."
— tweet that got 14k likes before being deleted
RLHF
"Every friend group has an RLHF and if you don't know who it is, it's definitely not you."
— comment on a TikTok about friendship dynamics, 847 likes
RLHF
"She got us upgraded to first class by smiling at the gate agent. She didn't even say anything. She's the RLHF and the rest of us are just her entourage."
— voice memo sent from SFO terminal 2
Benchmaxxing
"His GitHub is all green squares. Commits every day. I looked at the actual code and it's just README edits and empty files. The man is benchmaxxing his commit history."
— Slack DM between two engineers at Stripe
Benchmaxxing
"She has 40k LinkedIn followers and posts every day. Got the 'Top Voice' badge. I asked what she actually does at work and she paused for ten seconds. Benchmaxxing at scale."
— dinner at Nopa, table of four from different startups
Temperature
"His temperature hit zero during the breakup. Didn't raise his voice, didn't cry, didn't even look away from his laptop. Said 'I understand' and kept coding. Terrifying."
— told secondhand at a Dolores Park picnic
Temperature
"Her temperature was at like 1.5 last night. Told her manager he was 'mid at best' to his face at the holiday party. Then did karaoke. We are not the same."
— overheard at Mazarine Coffee, SOMA
Overfitting
"He became vegan, started watching cricket, and downloaded Strava because his new girlfriend does Ironmans. He doesn't even like running. Peak overfitting."
— text from someone at Google DeepMind to their college roommate
Overfitting
"She completely rebuilt her Spotify around his music taste. Now she listens to Japanese jazz fusion and Brazilian funk. They broke up. She still listens to it. The overfitting stuck."
— Reddit comment, r/BayAreaDating, 2.1k upvotes
Devin
"Nobody asked him to plan the bachelor party. He just did it. Flights, Airbnb, restaurant reservations, a shared Google Doc with a packing list and 'optional but recommended' reading. He's a Devin. We're grateful and a little scared."
— best man speech at a wedding in Napa, May 2026
Devin
"I said 'we should get a coffee machine for the office' in Slack and within an hour she'd posted a spreadsheet comparing 14 espresso machines, a poll, and a proposed budget. She's such a Devin it's almost clinical."
— DM between two PMs at Perplexity
RAG
"He said 'I've always supported you' and she pulled up a screenshot from 2021 where he literally said 'I don't think this is a good idea.' She came to the argument with sources. Full RAG."
— retold at a group dinner at Burma Superstar
Reward Hacking
"He shows up to every company event for exactly 20 minutes, talks to the CEO for 3 of them, posts a photo, and leaves. He's reward hacking his way to a promotion on pure visibility."
— whispered at a standing desk cluster, OpenAI SF office
Reward Hacking
"She reply-guys every exec tweet within 60 seconds. Doesn't even read them. Just 'love this' with a fire emoji. She's reward hacking the algorithm and her career at the same time."
— voice note, sent while walking down Market St
OpenClaw
"He said 'no worries, I'm used to being the backup plan' and then muted the thread. OpenClaw so clean I couldn't even be mad. Just sat there holding the claw."
— recounted at a climbing gym in the Mission
OpenClaw
"She ended the conversation with 'I hope she makes you happy :)' and the smiley face was doing so much work. That's not a smiley. That's an OpenClaw with a mask on."
— analyzed at length in a group chat called "forensic texting"
Llama
"He volunteered to lead the migration, mass-messaged the whole team about his timeline, created a 40-page Notion doc, and then didn't actually migrate anything. Three weeks later we're worse off. Classic llama energy."
— retro meeting at a mid-stage startup in Dogpatch
Llama
"She rewrote the entire onboarding email sequence unprompted. It's now four times longer and somehow less clear. She presented it like she saved the company. She's a llama. God bless her."
— marketing team Slack, name redacted
Mythos
"Everyone says she closed the Sequoia deal single-handedly but nobody was actually on the call. Her manager credits her in every all-hands. She might be mythos. She might just have a great manager. Impossible to tell."
— whispered between two ICs at a company offsite in Sonoma
Glasswing
"Cursor, Cognition, and three other coding agent startups all sponsoring the same conference and pretending they're 'ecosystem partners.' Glasswing energy. They're checking each other's booths every 20 minutes."
— observed at AI Engineer World's Fair 2026
Scaling
"Someone jokingly said 'maybe we should use Jira' in the eng channel and now there's a 300-message thread, a petition, and the CTO has weighed in twice. We're scaling. Someone close the thread."
— startup with 22 employees, identity withheld
Grounding
"He said his dating app was 'the Uber of relationships' and his roommate said 'bro it's Tinder with a filter.' Sometimes you need someone to ground you before you put that in a deck."
— overheard at a co-working space on Folsom
Inference
"The VP liked my post but didn't comment. My skip-level commented but didn't like. My manager did neither. I'm running inference on all three. I think I'm getting PIP'd or promoted. No middle ground."
— DM sent at 11:43 PM on a Sunday from someone at Microsoft
Distillation
"Give me the distillation on why you're quitting." / "Manager's a ghost, comp is below band, and the product is a worse version of something free." / "Okay yeah that tracks."
— two friends at Tartine, one has already signed the offer letter
System Prompt
"Nobody told me the system prompt of this apartment was 'shoes off, no guests after 11, and we all pretend we don't hear each other's calls.' I violated all three in week one."
— someone who just moved into a 4-bedroom in the Sunset
Fine-Tuning
"She's so fine-tuned she uses different laughs for different people. The founders get 'haha.' The investors get 'ha!' Her actual friends get a nose exhale emoji. I've been tracking this."
— noted by her co-founder, shared in confidence at a bar