About
Cody Feda
builder|teacher|connector
San Francisco, CA
I've spent my career at the intersection of building software and helping others do it better. I've led engineering teams, shipped products, and spent more time than I'd like to admit in post-mortems figuring out what went wrong and why.
As a developer advocate, I've worked with developer communities, written documentation, given talks, and built tooling and examples that help developers understand complex systems. The common thread in all of it: making hard things understandable without lying about the complexity.
I care about the gap between how technology is marketed and how it actually works. Not because I enjoy being a skeptic, but because understanding what something actually does - versus what the vendor says it does - is the difference between using a tool well and using it wrong.
Buzzword Compliance
The AI ecosystem in particular has a jargon problem. Every week there's a new term that gets announced, hyped, and deployed in a hundred pitch decks before anyone agrees on what it means. "Agentic". "RAG". "MCP". "Vibe coding". Some of these terms describe genuinely important technical ideas. Others are marketing dressing on things engineers already had a word for.
Buzzword Compliance is my attempt to sort them out. Each episode picks one term, explains what it actually refers to, and assigns it a tier rating:
- Load-Bearing - this technology is doing real, irreplaceable work in systems that depend on it. Remove it and things fall down.
- Structural - this is a real pattern or tool that solves a genuine problem, but it's not the only way to solve it and the term is sometimes misused.
- Ornamental - this term describes something real at most, but the word itself carries no technical content. It's a label, not a spec.
The goal isn't to debunk or dismiss. It's to give you a sharper vocabulary so you can make better decisions - about what to build, what to adopt, and what to ignore.