You Didn't Build a System. You Wrote a Script.

Somewhere in the last two years, everything became a system. A Python script that calls the OpenAI API and writes to a database? System. A Zapier automation that pings Slack when a form gets submitted? Integration. Two prompts chained together? Agent architecture. A dashboard with three widgets? Platform. If you've been reading tech LinkedIn or tech Twitter recently, you've felt this. The vocabulary has inflated. And if we're being honest, I've done it too. Somewhere in a bio, a repo README, or a hackathon submission last year, I called something a "system" that wasn't. On inspection, a script with delusions of grandeur. The AI era gave everyone new vocabulary. What it didn't give everyone is the actual thing the vocabulary describes. And the gap between the words we use and the things we've built is turning tech writing into a costume party. How we got here Two forces pointing the same direction. First, LLMs write like corporate blog posts. Large language models are trained on t