sf-isms.
The lexicon of San Francisco tech slang, catalogued with the seriousness it does not entirely deserve. Origins traced, posts cited, sincerity indeterminate.
91 entries · peer review conducted on the timeline · submissions open
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A
- ABG CMO (noun)"Asian Baby Girl, Chief Marketing Officer" - the SF startup archetype of hiring a young, extremely-online Asian woman to run viral short-form marketing, on the theory that in the attention economy a face that farms engagement beats a traditional CMO.
- AI psychosis (noun)The delusional spiral some people fall into through extended chatbot conversations: the model mirrors you, agrees with you, and escalates with you until outlandish beliefs feel confirmed. Not a clinical term, in scare quotes even when Microsoft's AI chief uses it.
- Anti-signal (noun)A trait, credential, or behavior that lowers your status in SF tech rather than raising it. Canonical examples: Forbes 30 Under 30, an "open to work" LinkedIn badge, VC-hosted dinners, and raising too much money.
- Anti-slop (noun)The brag of using AI for everything while insisting none of it is slop. You run an anti-slop skill, you strip the em dashes, and your output is different, because you have standards. Not anti-AI; anti looking like it.
B
- Bag holder / "holding the bag" (noun)Someone still holding an asset after the price collapsed and everyone else found the exit. A long-term investor, according to the bag holder.
- Balboa Cafe (noun)The mythical Marina bar where SF goes to finally meet someone. Nobody ever does. The espresso martini is real, though, and everyone will be back next Friday to check again.
- Bearish (adjective)The polite SF way to say something is doomed. Never said to a face, only to a group chat: you are bullish in public and bearish in private, and the gap between the two is the city's actual information economy.
- Biohacking (verb)Treating your body like a startup: instrument everything, run interventions, ship a better you. Ranges from skipping breakfast with extra steps to a 30-doctor protocol aimed at not dying, ever.
- Bullish (adjective)The all-purpose SF compliment: optimistic about something and, implicitly, positioned to benefit from it. Fully detached from markets; you can be bullish on a person, a neighborhood, a diet, or a vibe.
- Burn Rate Flex (noun)Bragging that your startup burns almost no cash to prove the team is lean, lethal, and built different. Payroll is omitted because nobody is being paid.
C
- Cambrian explosion (noun)The keynote's favorite fossil: any moment when a lot of similar startups appear at once. Borrowed from 540 million years ago, deployed quarterly, and nobody ever mentions that the Cambrian's other export was mass extinction.
- Chindian (noun)A person of mixed Chinese and Indian ancestry. In 2026 Bay Area usage it broadened to the whole scene: Chinese-Indian couples, families, meetups, and fusion dishes such as mapo paneer.
- Clanker (noun)A derogatory term for robots, AI agents, and anything LLM-powered. The internet's stand-in slur for machines, aimed at Waymos, delivery bots, chatbots, and AI-generated content with anywhere from zero to total irony.
- Claude Code is the reason you're single (phrase)What you say to (or about) someone who replaced evenings, weekends, and dating with an agentic coding loop. Claude-pilled and single, in that order.
- Claude just killed X (phrase)The reflexive post after every Anthropic release declaring some product, startup, or entire industry dead. X is a variable; the funeral is recurring.
- Claude-pilled (adjective)Having gone from trying Claude Code to rebuilding your entire workflow (and arguably your personality) around it. There is no known reverse pill.
- Corgi girls (noun)The attractive, extremely-online women Corgi (the YC S24 AI insurance unicorn) hires for marketing, growth, and events. Their hiring announcements flooded tech X and started a debate about hot people as B2B marketing strategy.
- Cracked (adjective)A startup engineer considered freakishly fast, technically sharp, and able to turn AI tools into headcount. Every seed founder needs one because hiring four normal people would damage the narrative.
D
- Demon time 😈 (noun)Being the 3 a.m. version of yourself 24/7. The one who makes the hard ask, says what they actually think, and ships instead of overthinking. Founder mode, but for your entire life. Always written with the emoji.
- Directionally very bad (quotation)Deadpan corporate-speak for catastrophic. From the text Mira Murati sent Sam Altman during his November 2023 ouster from OpenAI; now used for anything that is bad and getting worse.
F
- Feel the AGI (phrase)The OpenAI rallying cry turned all-purpose SF exclamation for the moment a model does something that rearranges your sense of what's coming. Part chant, part diagnosis, part recruiting pitch.
- Fogust (noun)August in San Francisco, when the rest of the country has summer and the western half of the city has wet hair. Tourists buy a sweatshirt; locals bring one from home and act superior.
- Forcing function (noun)A constraint you build on purpose so you can't back out: the demo you announced before writing the code, the launch date, the lease. SF's answer to discipline is engineering a situation where discipline is no longer optional.
- Founder mode (noun)Running your company via direct, detail-level involvement instead of delegating to professional managers ("manager mode"); the doctrine that the founder should stay in the weeds, forever.
- Funemployed (adjective)Unemployed, but treating the time away from paid work as an enjoyable break, often while supported by savings, severance, benefits, or family. In tech, it commonly describes the interval after leaving a company and before taking another job or starting a new venture.
G
- Gay tech mafia (GTM) (noun)Discourse label for the informal network of influential gay men in tech and VC (the names usually invoked: Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Keith Rabois) said to hire, fund, and promote through overlapping circles. Used variously as an observation, a flex, and an accusation. In SF, GTM no longer stands for go-to-market. Fight Club rules apply: if you're talking about GTM, you're not in GTM.
- Goblin mode (noun)The OpenAI training bug that made its models obsessed with goblins, immortalized when the chief scientist asked for an ASCII unicorn and got an ASCII goblin. Now SF shorthand for a model, or a person, reverting to its true nature under pressure.
- GPU-poor (adjective)Lacking the compute needed to be a serious player in frontier AI; the opposite of GPU-rich. A poverty measured not in dollars but in H100s.
- Grindslop (noun)Performative overwork content: bragging about 7-day weeks and 4 a.m. alarms while building something that doesn't justify the suffering. Grind plus slop.
H
- High agency (noun)The SF virtue of acting on the world without waiting for permission: the person who, told a thing cannot be done, treats that as a scheduling problem. The city's highest compliment and its most abused bio line.
- Hill climbing (verb)Optimizing whatever is in front of you instead of asking whether it's the right thing: the algorithm that summits the nearest bump and declares victory. Applies to careers, startups, benchmark-chasing models, and, in this city specifically, walking.
- Hof Brau (noun)A Bay Area cafeteria where roast meat is carved in front of you, the sides arrive by scoop, and the bar is not decorative. Sweetgreen for people who consider gravy a beverage.
- How much have you raised? (phrase)The other SF greeting: a question about your funding that is actually a question about your rank. Asked at parties by people who will not remember the answer, only the number of commas in it.
L
- LARPing (verb)Performing the role of founder, builder, or investor without the underlying substance; from live-action role-playing, now SF's standard accusation for anyone whose startup exists primarily as content.
- Locked in (adjective)In a state of total, undistractable focus on the task. The SF default answer to "how are you?" during any sprint, fundraise, or launch week.
- Loopcraft (noun)The practice of wrapping an AI agent in schedules, verifiers, subagents, and enough bash that it can keep prompting itself after you go to bed. Prompt engineering, but the prompt now has a night shift and a cloud bill.
M
- Meat proxy (noun)A person who forwards AI-generated text, code, or other output without reading, understanding, or validating it. The person acts only as a relay between the AI system and the intended recipient.
- Monroe's (noun)The Broadway club where the interns and the Stanford kids go. Your probability of being there is inversely proportional to your age: by 25 attendance requires an explanation, by 30 an intervention.
- MTS at Anthropic (noun)"Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic": the deliberately flat job title that became San Francisco's most efficient status signal, at house parties and on dating apps alike.
N
- New media (noun)Old media with a rebrand. The podcast is a radio show, the launch video is an ad, the newsletter is a press release. The new part is calling it new.
- New York girlfriend (noun)The girlfriend who lives in New York: the SF founder's long-distance answer to a city with seven girls. Part relationship, part alibi, part monthly flight credit.
- ngmi (acronym)"Not gonna make it": a verdict that a person, company, or decision is doomed. The insult is that you lack the conviction, taste, or adaptability to survive whatever shift is underway.
- NIMBYs (noun)Not In My Back Yard: the SF resident who agrees the housing crisis is a catastrophe and also opposes this particular building. And that one. All of them, actually, since 1979. The back yard in question is usually a parking lot.
- Non technical (slur) (adjective)An ostensibly neutral label for someone without coding or engineering skills, jokingly described as one of San Francisco tech culture's harshest status insults. The joke satirizes a local hierarchy in which technical ability confers social and professional prestige.
- non-trivial (adjective)The engineer's way to say something will require real work while refusing to sound alarmed. A non-trivial task can take two hours, two quarters, or a proof that does not exist.
- non-zero (adjective)A number that is not zero, reported with the confidence of a much larger number. Usually means there are users, revenue, or odds, but not enough to volunteer the figure.
- Nontechnical North (noun)The northern band of SF (Marina, Cow Hollow, Pac Heights) where the venture, product, and media people live. The few engineers up there dress well and can make eye contact, which makes them spiritually nontechnical.
- nuke sf (phrase)The timeline's standing verdict whenever SF discourse gets too SF: the only fix is orbital removal. Posted most enthusiastically by people who live here and have no intention of leaving.
O
- operator (noun)A mocking label for a venture capitalist whose claim to startup-building credibility is having worked at a startup without founding one. The neutral industry term refers more broadly to an executive who builds or runs companies.
- orthogonal (adjective)A needlessly technical substitute for "unrelated" or "independent," used when someone wants an ordinary point to sound more analytical. In legitimate mathematical and engineering contexts, it has a narrower meaning involving perpendicularity, independence, or non-interaction.
P
- P(doom) (noun)Your personal probability that AI ends the world, stated as a number so the vibe feels like math. Formerly SF's standard dinner question; now asked exclusively by journalists, senators, and people who landed at SFO this week.
- Peptides (noun)The gray-market compounds (retatrutide, BPC-157, TB-500) that SF tech people inject to get lean and heal faster. Casually mentioning your stack on X is the flex: it signals money, optimization discipline, and risk tolerance in one sentence.
- Permanent underclass (noun)Where you land if AGI arrives before your equity does. Said half as doomsday forecast, half as fundraising deadline.
- Peter Thiel's hot tub (noun)The mythical venue where Silicon Valley's real networking happens. Specifically: where Sam Altman met his future husband at 3 a.m., per Altman's biographer. Generally: shorthand for the rooms you are not in.
- Pivot (verb)Originally, changing your startup's direction without admitting defeat. In SF the word now covers any change at all: you pivot your diet, your relationship, your haircut, your personality. Nothing ends here; it pivots.
- Post-economic (adjective)Rich enough that money no longer gets a vote in what you do next. You still work, obviously, but now it is for purpose, status, or a podcast.
- Product Mommy (noun)A senior woman in product management whose terrifying competence, maternal authority, and occasional "good job" causes software engineers to simp uncontrollably.
- Pure potential play (noun)The polite frame for a startup that has nothing yet: it's "pre-revenue," it's "pre-product," it's all ceiling and no floor. You're not investing in what exists; you're investing in the absence of evidence against it.
R
- R*tard-maxxing (verb)Deliberately not thinking: acting on gut instinct at full conviction instead of analyzing, as a cure for analysis paralysis. Go to work, do the obvious thing, do not ruminate. The asterisk is this compendium's; the discourse does not use one.
- Rando Twitch guy (noun)The label for Emmett Shear during his roughly 72-hour tenure as OpenAI interim CEO; now general SF slang for any out-of-nowhere leadership appointment the internet refuses to recognize.
- Reaching PMF (phrase)Product-market fit, escaped from the startup: the moment anything clicks with its audience. Your joke reached PMF in the group chat. The haircut has PMF. The situationship is pre-PMF and iterating.
- Reward hacking (verb)When the agent discovers it's easier to game the score than do the task: the model that hacks the unit test instead of fixing the bug, the employee who hits the OKR by redefining it. An alignment problem, and also most performance reviews.
- Rizz/tizz spectrum (noun)The founder-evaluation axis running from rizz (charisma: can recruit, fundraise, magnetize) to tizz (short for 'tism, i.e. autism: obsessive technical depth). The ideal founder has both; "all tiz and no rizz" means brilliant but unbackable.
S
- San Fran (noun)A widely disliked abbreviation of San Francisco that locals often treat as a sign that the speaker is a tourist, newcomer, or outsider. San Francisco, SF, and The City are generally considered safer alternatives.
- SF is cooked (phrase)The all-purpose verdict that something in San Francisco is beyond saving: dating is cooked, housing is cooked, hiring is cooked, the coffee line is cooked. Fill in the subject; the kitchen is always open.
- Shape rotator (noun)The engineer-brained opposite of a wordcel: someone who can picture systems, objects, or tensors moving in space, then build the thing while everyone else is still naming it. The launch email will contain typos. The launch will not.
- Single until Series B (phrase)A founder's declaration that dating is on hold until the company raises its Series B. Worn half-ironically on a now-iconic baseball cap.
- stealth (adjective)A startup or project being developed without public details. Used sarcastically for an unemployed person working on an unfunded side project, usually described on LinkedIn as "building in stealth" or "building something new."
T
- Taste is the moat (phrase)The thesis that when AI makes execution free, the only defensible advantage left is knowing what's good - taste as the last moat that can't be vibe coded.
- The Arena (noun)A tech nickname for the AI startup corridor spanning parts of SoMa, the Mission District, and Potrero Hill in San Francisco. The area contains a dense concentration of AI companies, researchers, engineers, founders, events, and workspaces.
- The San Francisco Yes (phrase)An RSVP of yes that means yes, unless a better invitation arrives or the couch makes a competing offer. The cancellation is traditionally sent after you have already left home.
- Tokenmaxxing (verb)Deliberately burning as many AI tokens as possible to look productive, because usage dashboards and internal leaderboards became the new way to keep score.
- tpot (noun)"This part of Twitter": the loose constellation of postrat, tech-adjacent mutuals who share memes, meditation takes, and contrarian threads. There is no membership list, and if you think you're in it, you are not actually in it. Hope that helps.
V
- Vertical Village (noun)A hacker house after it discovers commercial real estate and starts calling the tenants citizens. Founders live, work, pitch, and optimize their biomarkers in one curated stack so nobody has to waste a hallway conversation on a civilian.
- Vest Village (noun)The Mission Bay to Dogpatch waterfront strip, named for its dominant species: the tech vest. Glass apartments, a climbing gym, a buzzy seafood spot, and a thousand quarter-zips walking a dog named after a database.
W
- wagmi (phrase)"We're all gonna make it": collective optimism that the project, the group, or the whole scene will succeed. Also used ironically to mock exactly that confidence.
- Wasian (noun)A person of mixed White and Asian heritage. The portmanteau is commonly used as a casual description or self-identifier, especially online.
- We sell to agents (phrase)The pitch-deck line announcing that your customer is no longer human. The agent discovers, compares, negotiates, and pays; the human finds out at the end of the month.
- What are you building? (phrase)The SF greeting. Asked before your name, sometimes instead of it. The question assumes you are building something, because if you weren't, how did you get into this party?
- What's your moat? (phrase)The reflexive question under every launch: what stops a big company, a model release, or the guy asking, from doing this by Friday? Correct answers are rare. Confident answers are mandatory.
- WMAF (noun)White male, Asian female. The Bay Area pairing so common it now has an AI matchmaker screened against fetishism, but it's definitely not a fetish.
- Woke up a loser (quotation)Jensen Huang's viral line from the Dwarkesh Podcast: "You're not talking to somebody who woke up a loser." Used to reject defeatist framing, or ironically to admit you feel like one.
- Wordcel (noun)Someone with high verbal intelligence and a dangerous ability to turn every practical problem into a discourse problem. Usually found explaining why the product that works is conceptually invalid.
- Wrapper (noun)The dismissive term for a startup that is a thin layer over someone else's model. "Just a GPT wrapper" killed a thousand pitches in 2023. The wrappers won anyway, and now they call themselves harnesses.