Beyond the Buzzwords: Context, Prompts, and Tools

Wake up in 2026, open a coding assistant, and you're jumping into a terminology soup: Agents, Subagents, Prompts, Contexts, Memory, Modes, Permissions, Tools, Plugins, Skills, Hooks, MCP, LSP, Slash Commands, Workflows, Instructions and etc. Companies building these tools love creating new branding for every slight variation in interaction. Instead of getting trapped in the vocabulary treadmill, look at the architecture. Every AI coding tool, no matter how fancy the marketing, deals with the same three things: context, tools, and prompts . Context: The Memory Budget Context is the agent's working memory. It's also the bottleneck. While context windows have grown, they're still finite and expensive. Every file you open, every tool output you receive, every turn in the conversation eats into your budget. The different terminologies you see imply different strategies for managing this constraint. Slash Commands ( /commit , /explain ): Reusable instructions. When you catch yourself typing