Glossary
Plain-language definitions, written to answer the question in the first line.
Shadow AI is the use of AI tools and AI-built software inside a company without the knowledge or oversight of IT or management. It is the AI-era version of shadow IT: employees build or adopt tools that work, but nobody governs where the data goes or who can access them.
Vibe coding is building software by describing what you want to an AI assistant in natural language and iterating on the result, rather than writing the code yourself. The term was popularized by Andrej Karpathy in early 2025.
BYOC means a platform works with the AI assistant you already use and pay for, instead of forcing you to use its own embedded AI. You build with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or another assistant; the platform handles what comes after.
An MCP server is a service that exposes tools to AI assistants through the Model Context Protocol, an open standard introduced by Anthropic in 2024. Connecting one gives the assistant new abilities it can invoke directly, such as querying a database or deploying an app.
A pull request preview is a live, temporary URL where a proposed change runs before it is merged. Instead of reading a diff or trusting a screenshot, a reviewer opens the link and uses the changed app directly.
OAuth device flow is a way for a tool without its own browser, like a CLI or an agent, to sign in: the tool shows a short code, the person approves it once in their browser, and the tool receives its credentials without ever seeing a password.
Scale to zero means an app releases its computing resources when nobody is using it and starts again on the next request. The trade-off is the cold start: the first request after a quiet period takes longer while the app wakes up.
A rollback returns an app to a previous version after a bad deploy. Instead of debugging in production while users wait, you restore the last version that worked, then fix the problem calmly.