Basics

The terms you meet when you hand automation or AI work to someone, in plain words, and why each one matters when you hire.

• ChatGPT the app vs the AI API: what is the difference?The chat app is a finished product you talk to for a flat monthly fee; the API is the same family of models offered as a raw service your software calls, billed separately and per use, to whichever account owns the key.
• What are AI tokens, and how do they become a monthly bill?A token is a small piece of text, often part of a word, and AI providers charge for every token the model reads and every token it writes, so your bill grows with how much text passes through it.
• What are aspect ratios and safe zones?The aspect ratio is the shape of the video frame (9:16 is tall, 16:9 is wide); the safe zone is the part of that frame the app does not cover with its own buttons, caption and username.
• What are environment variables and secrets?Environment variables are named settings, like an account ID or an API key, that a program reads from its surroundings when it starts, so the secret values never have to be written into the code itself.
• What are escrow and milestone payments?Escrow means you pay the platform first and it holds the money until you approve the delivery; milestones split one project into several smaller payments, each released after its own approval.
• What are proxies, and why does a scraper need them?A proxy is a go-between computer that sends your scraper's requests to a website under its own internet address, so the site sees the proxy's address instead of the scraper's.
• What are robots.txt and a site's terms of service?Robots.txt is a public note a website leaves for automated visitors saying which pages they should not fetch, and the terms of service are the site's written rules for anyone using it, people and scripts alike.
• What are TAM, SAM and SOM, and what is bottom-up market sizing?TAM, SAM and SOM are three nested sizes of your market, from everyone who could ever buy to the part you can realistically win, and bottom-up sizing builds them from customers you can count times what each one pays you.
• What does "safe to re-run" mean?An automation is safe to re-run (developers say idempotent) when running it a second time on the same input does nothing new: no second email, no second post, no second charge.
• What is a cron schedule?A cron schedule is a rule that tells a computer to start a job at set times, such as every day at 9:00, whether or not anyone is there to press a button.
• What is a rate limit?A rate limit is the maximum number of requests a service will accept from you in a set period of time; go over it and the service refuses further requests until the period resets.
• What is a system prompt, and should I own the one my chatbot developer writes?A system prompt is the set of standing instructions a chatbot or AI job is given before every conversation, telling it who it is, what it may answer and what it must never do, and it is as much a part of what you paid for as the code.
• What is a three-statement financial model?A three-statement financial model is a spreadsheet where your profit and loss, your cash flow and your balance sheet are linked, so changing one assumption updates all three and they always agree.
• What is a webhook?A webhook is a message one app sends to another the moment something happens, so the second app does not have to keep asking whether anything is new.
• What is an API key, and who should hold it?An API key is a secret pass an app gives your software so it can use that app on your behalf, and whoever holds the pass can act, and spend, as you.
• What is an MCP server?An MCP server is a small program that sits between an AI assistant and one of your tools, and tells the assistant exactly which actions it may take there and how.
• What is Git, and why should your freelancer hand you the repository?Git is a tool that records every saved version of a project's code, with who changed what and why, so any change can be inspected or undone; the repository is the folder that holds that whole history.
• What is heartbeat monitoring (a dead man's switch)?Heartbeat monitoring expects a regular sign of life from your automation and raises the alarm when that sign does not arrive on time, so a job that silently stops is noticed.
• What is OAuth, and why does my automation keep asking me to reconnect?OAuth is the way one app gets permission to use your account in another app without ever seeing your password: you click Allow once, and the app receives a token that keeps working until it expires or is cancelled.
• What is RAG (retrieval) in a chatbot?RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) means the chatbot first searches your own documents for the passages that match a question, then writes its answer from those passages instead of from memory.
• Who pays for the music in my videos?A music licence is written permission to use a track in a video, and it belongs to a specific person, channel or use, so the question is never just whether the song is royalty-free but whose licence covers your video, on which platform, for what kind of use.