AI & SaaS
glossary.
Short, accurate definitions of the terms that come up when building AI products and SaaS platforms.
- AI Agent
- Software that uses a large language model to choose steps and tools to complete a task, such as looking up data, calling an API and drafting a response.
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- RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)
- A technique where an AI system retrieves relevant passages from a document collection and uses them to generate a grounded answer, often with citations.
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- LLM (Large Language Model)
- A neural network trained on large amounts of text that can generate and analyze language. Examples include GPT, Claude, Gemini and Llama.
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- Vector Database
- A database that stores embeddings and finds the most similar items to a query by distance. PostgreSQL with the pgvector extension is a common choice.
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- Embeddings
- Lists of numbers that represent the meaning of text or images, so that similar content has similar vectors. Used for semantic search and RAG.
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- Tool Calling / Function Calling
- A model capability where the LLM returns a structured request to run a named function with arguments; the application runs it and returns the result to the model.
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- Structured Outputs
- Constraining a model's response to a defined schema (for example JSON with specific fields) so the application can safely parse and store it.
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- AI SaaS
- A software-as-a-service product whose core value is delivered by AI features, combined with standard SaaS parts: accounts, billing, dashboards and admin.
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- Multi-Tenant SaaS
- An architecture where one application serves many customer organizations (tenants) while keeping each tenant's data isolated.
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- FastAPI
- A Python web framework for building typed, asynchronous APIs with automatic OpenAPI documentation.
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- Django
- A mature Python web framework with a built-in ORM, authentication and admin interface.
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- API
- An application programming interface: a defined set of requests one program can make to another, commonly over HTTP as REST or GraphQL.
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- Webhook
- An HTTP request a service sends to your application when an event happens, such as Stripe notifying you that a payment succeeded.
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- RBAC (Role-Based Access Control)
- A permission model where users are assigned roles and each role grants a set of allowed actions.
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- Stripe Connect
- Stripe's product for marketplaces and platforms that need to onboard sellers and route payouts to them while taking a platform fee.
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- Supabase
- An open-source backend platform built on PostgreSQL that provides a database, authentication, storage and realtime features.
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- Row-Level Security (RLS)
- A PostgreSQL feature that filters which rows each user can read or change using policies enforced by the database itself.
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