EarlyTerms
Tracking what's next in AI & Dev Tools — before it's everywhere

Discover new terms
before they trend

We find emerging keywords 7–30 days before they go mainstream — with competition data, monetization signals, and actionable next steps so you can move first.

Every Tuesday · 5–8 curated terms · Free forever

Latest Terms

Stage = days since the term's current meaning emerged, not since we detected it.

AI / Content / SEO
Established
AEO

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is the practice of structuring content so that AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude — pick your page as the extractable answer to a use…

~14K/mo0
Emerged 2025-05-14 · 341d ago View report →
AI / Creator Tools / Video
Nascent
HyperFrames

HyperFrames is an open-source video rendering framework from HeyGen that lets AI agents compose videos by writing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, then outputs MP4, MOV, or WebM via Puppeteer + FFmpeg. The …

~1.6K/mo0
Emerged 2026-04-16 · 4d ago View report →
AI / Policy / Industrial Strategy
Established
Intelligence Age

Intelligence Age is OpenAI's preferred epochal framing for the AI era — the successor to the Stone, Agricultural, and Industrial Ages in a narrative where compute, energy, and frontier models drive th…

~12K/mo0
Emerged 2024-09-23 · 574d ago View report →
AI / Protocols / Security
Established
AI Agent Identity

AI Agent Identity is the emerging set of protocols and file formats that let an autonomous agent prove who it is, what it's authorized to do on whose behalf, and what values it embodies. Two layers: c…

~322/mo0
Emerged 2025-07-26 · 268d ago View report →
AI / Content / SEO
Established
GEO

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the practice of structuring content so that large language models — ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Claude — cite, quote, or recommend your brand inside the…

~16K/mo0
Emerged 2023-11-16 · 886d ago View report →
Developer Tools / Messaging / Automation
Rising
WhatsApp CLI

WhatsApp CLI refers to a new wave of command-line clients that speak the WhatsApp Web multidevice protocol so terminals, shell scripts, and AI agents can read, search, and send messages. They authenti…

~161/mo0
Emerged 2025-12-12 · 129d ago View report →
AI / Design Tools
Nascent
Claude Design

Claude Design is an Anthropic Labs product that turns a conversation with Claude into polished visual artifacts — prototypes, slides, one-pagers, pitch decks, and marketing collateral — rendered as li…

~16K/mo0
Emerged 2026-04-17 · 3d ago View report →
AI / Developer Tools / Agent Frameworks
Rising
ClawHub

[ClawHub](https://clawhub.ai/) is the public skill registry and marketplace for [OpenClaw](https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw), the self-hosted personal AI agent. Developers publish text-based `SKIL…

~3.2K/mo0
Emerged 2026-01-03 · 107d ago View report →
AI / Concepts / LLM Practice
Established
Context Engineering

Context engineering is the discipline of curating every token that enters an LLM's context window — system prompt, tools, retrieved data, conversation history, memory, files — so the model can plausib…

~2.4K/mo0
Emerged 2025-06-25 · 299d ago View report →
AI / Foundation Models / Open-Source LLMs
Emergent
Qwen3.6

Qwen3.6 is Alibaba's Qwen team's next-generation LLM line, positioned around "real-world agents." It spans two tiers: the closed [Qwen3.6-Plus](https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.6) (released April 2, 2026…

~2.7K/mo0
Emerged 2026-04-02 · 18d ago View report →
AI / Foundation Models / Open Source
Established
Qwen3

Qwen3 is Alibaba's third-generation open-weight foundation model family, launched [April 28, 2025](https://qwenlm.github.io/blog/qwen3/) under Apache 2.0. It introduced a hybrid 'Thinking' / 'Non-Thin…

~6.3K/mo0
Emerged 2025-04-28 · 357d ago View report →
Culture / Internet Memes / Personality Tests
Emergent
SBTI

SBTI — Silly Big Type Indicator (Chinese slang expansion: 傻逼 / shabi) — is an internet-native personality quiz parodying MBTI. It scores 15 behavioural dimensions across five domains (Self, Emotion, A…

~16K/mo0
Emerged 2026-04-09 · 11d ago View report →
AI / Developer Culture / Productivity
Validating
Tokenmaxxing

Tokenmaxxing is the practice — and increasingly the critique — of treating AI token consumption as a productivity metric. Engineers ship more AI-generated code, climb internal token-burn leaderboards,…

~161/mo0
Emerged 2026-03-20 · 31d ago View report →
AI / Developer Tools / Infrastructure
Validating
Agent Harness

An agent harness is the middleware between a large language model and the real world — code that runs the agent loop, calls tools, manages memory, enforces guardrails, and recovers from errors. Practi…

~5.0K/mo0
Emerged 2026-02-11 · 68d ago View report →
AI / Developer Tools / Agent Infrastructure
Established
Agent Loop

An agent loop is the control-flow pattern at the center of every autonomous LLM agent: the model observes its context, reasons about what to do, calls a tool, reads the result, and loops — until it pr…

~5.2K/mo0
Emerged 2025-05-15 · 340d ago View report →
AI / Concepts
Established
Agentic AI

Agentic AI names a class of AI systems that autonomously plan, decide, and take actions to meet user-defined goals — not single-shot chatbot answers, but a goal-driven loop that calls tools, updates s…

~7.7K/mo0
Emerged 2024-10-21 · 546d ago View report →
AI / Developer Tools
Established
Agentic Coding

Agentic coding is the software-development pattern where an autonomous AI agent plans, writes, tests, and iterates on code against a feedback loop — running its own builds, reading its own errors, and…

~644/mo0
Emerged 2025-04-19 · 366d ago View report →
SaaS / Developer Tools / Open Source
Nascent
Cal.com

Cal.com is a scheduling and booking platform — for years the leading open-source alternative to Calendly — that on April 15, 2026 announced it is closing its core codebase. The production app now live…

~2.1K/mo0
Emerged 2026-04-15 · 5d ago View report →
Infra / Networking / AI Agents
Nascent
Cloudflare Mesh

Cloudflare Mesh is a private-networking fabric that wires humans, devices, cloud VPCs, and AI agents into one encrypted network routed through Cloudflare's 330-city edge. Unlike a unidirectional Tunne…

~805/mo0
Emerged 2026-04-14 · 6d ago View report →
AI / Developer Tools / Agents
Established
Coding Agents

Coding Agents is the category name for AI developer tools that act on code autonomously — reading a repo, planning a change, editing files, running tests, and opening pull requests — rather than sugge…

~6.4K/mo0
Emerged 2025-05-19 · 336d ago View report →
AI / Developer Tools / Infrastructure
Established
Context Window

A [context window](https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/effective-context-engineering-for-ai-agents) is the span of tokens an LLM reads and reasons over in a single forward pass. In 2025-2026 the phr…

~10K/mo0
Emerged 2025-06-30 · 294d ago View report →
AI / Foundation Models / Voice
Nascent
Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS

[Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS](https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/gemini-models/gemini-3-1-flash-tts/) is Google DeepMind's text-to-speech model that generates expressive speech in 70+ …

~3.2K/mo0
Emerged 2026-04-15 · 5d ago View report →
AI / Foundation Models
Validating
Gemini 3.1 Flash

Gemini 3.1 Flash is Google's mid-2026 speed-tier refresh of the Gemini model family — a family-of-variants brand rather than a single model. Developers use "3.1 Flash" as the umbrella query; Google sh…

~1.6K/mo0
Emerged 2026-03-03 · 48d ago View report →
AI / Developer Tools / Local LLM
Established
LM Studio

LM Studio is a desktop GUI — Windows, macOS, Linux — for discovering, downloading, and running open-source large language models entirely on your own machine. It wraps llama.cpp, MLX, and a visual Hug…

~7.7K/mo0
Emerged 2023-05-03 · 1083d ago View report →
AI / Developer Tools / Infrastructure
Emergent
Managed Agents

Managed Agents is an infrastructure paradigm where cloud platforms host, orchestrate, and operate AI agents as a service. Instead of developers hand-building agent loops — memory, tool routing, state,…

~11K/mo0
Emerged 2026-04-08 · 12d ago View report →
AI / Developer Tools / Infrastructure
Established
MCP Server

An [MCP server](https://modelcontextprotocol.io/) is a small, standalone program that exposes one capability — a database, a filesystem, a security scanner, a trading API — to AI agents over the [Mode…

~1.3K/mo0
Emerged 2024-11-25 · 511d ago View report →
AI / Image Generation
Established
Nano Banana

Nano Banana is the codename, and now the public brand, for [Google DeepMind’s Gemini image-generation family](https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-image/flash/). The original Nano Banana shipped as ‘…

~10K/mo0
Emerged 2025-08-14 · 249d ago View report →
AI / Developer Tools
Nascent
Parallel Agents

Parallel Agents is the pattern of running multiple AI coding sessions at the same time against isolated copies of a codebase, with a human orchestrator switching between them as each returns results. …

~1.6K/mo0
Emerged 2026-04-14 · 6d ago View report →
Security / DevOps / Incident Response
Nascent
Webhook Secrets

A webhook secret is a shared string used to authenticate webhook deliveries: the sender computes an HMAC signature over the payload with the secret and sends it in a header like `X-Hub-Signature-256`;…

~161/mo0
Emerged 2026-04-14 · 6d ago View report →
AI / Developer Tools / Conventions
Established
AGENTS.md

AGENTS.md is an open, vendor-neutral markdown file placed at the root of a repository that tells AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor, Copilot, Jules, Amp, Factory, Windsurf) how to work w…

~9.7K/mo0
Emerged 2025-08-20 · 243d ago View report →
AI / Culture
Established
AI Slop

AI slop is a pejorative for generative-AI content — text, images, video, pull-requests — that is technically fluent but intellectually empty, mass-produced for clicks or compliance rather than communi…

~5.0K/mo0
Emerged 2024-05-24 · 696d ago View report →
AI / Developer Tools / Agent Frameworks
Established
Claude Agent SDK

[Claude Agent SDK](https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/overview) is Anthropic's programmatic toolkit for building AI agents on Claude. It exposes the same tool-loop, context management, subagent…

~2.7K/mo0
Emerged 2025-09-29 · 203d ago View report →
AI / Developer Tools / Coding Agents
Established
Claude Code

[Claude Code](https://claude.com/product/claude-code) is Anthropic's official command-line coding agent — a terminal tool that reads your codebase, edits files, runs commands, opens PRs, and drives lo…

~16K/mo0
Emerged 2025-02-24 · 420d ago View report →
AI / Frontier Models / AI Safety
Emergent
Claude Mythos

[Claude Mythos](https://red.anthropic.com/2026/mythos-preview/) is an unreleased frontier LLM from Anthropic, publicly previewed on April 7, 2026. Positioned as general-purpose, the preview centres on…

~1.9K/mo0
Emerged 2026-04-07 · 13d ago View report →
AI / Frontier Models / LLMs
Nascent
Claude Opus 4.7

[Claude Opus 4.7](https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-7) is Anthropic's flagship LLM, released April 16, 2026. It narrowly retakes the lead over GPT-5.4 and Gemini 3.1 Pro on agentic coding b…

~16K/mo0
Emerged 2026-04-16 · 4d ago View report →
AI / LLM Research / Context Engineering
Established
Context Rot

Context rot is the measurable degradation in large-language-model output quality as input length grows, even when the prompt stays well under the advertised context window. Models don't process the 10…

~161/mo0
Emerged 2025-07-14 · 280d ago View report →
Developer Tools / Security / Supply Chain
Rising
Dependency Cooldowns

A dependency cooldown is an intentional delay between when a package version is published and when your project is allowed to install it. The idea: let the wider ecosystem absorb the first hours of ri…

Emerged 2025-11-21 · 150d ago View report →
AI / Developer Tools / Infrastructure
Established
Model Context Protocol

[Model Context Protocol](https://modelcontextprotocol.io/) (MCP) is an open, JSON-RPC-2.0-based standard that defines how AI applications talk to external tools, data, and systems. The spec defines a …

~644/mo0
Emerged 2024-11-25 · 511d ago View report →
AI / Developer Tools / Coding Agents
Established
OpenAI Codex CLI

[OpenAI Codex CLI](https://developers.openai.com/codex/cli) is OpenAI's official terminal-resident coding agent: it reads a repo, edits files, runs commands, invokes subagents, and drives long tasks v…

~322/mo0
Emerged 2025-04-16 · 369d ago View report →
AI / Developer Tools / Agent Frameworks
Rising
OpenClaw

[OpenClaw](https://openclaw.ai/) is an open-source self-hosted personal AI agent: a long-running runtime that connects to any LLM (Claude, GPT, DeepSeek, Kimi, Gemini) and drives itself from messaging…

~11K/mo0
Emerged 2025-11-14 · 157d ago View report →
AI / Developer Tools
Established
OpenCode

OpenCode is an [open-source AI coding agent](https://opencode.ai/) that runs in the terminal and connects to any model provider — Claude, GPT, Gemini, local LLMs, 75+ providers via Models.dev. It’s th…

~16K/mo0
Emerged 2025-07-06 · 288d ago View report →
AI / Developer Tools / Agent Frameworks
Validating
Hermes Agent

[Hermes Agent](https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/) is an MIT-licensed, self-improving AI agent from Nous Research designed to live on a server — local, VPS, or serverless — and accumulate capabili…

~16K/mo0
Emerged 2026-02-22 · 57d ago View report →
· page 1 / 1

We spotted these before they went mainstream.

Emergent · Apr 2026
Managed Agents

Anthropic's background-jobs-for-LLMs category now has CrewAI, Devin, Claude Managed Agents, and a dozen Show HN launches.

Rising · Q1 2025
Vibe Coding

Karpathy's one-line Feb 2025 tweet spawned a whole genre of tools and a debate over software craftsmanship.

Validating · Oct 2025
Context Engineering

The discipline of shaping LLM context windows went from practitioner slang to a named specialty in under six months.

Every term comes with a full research report

Definition
Definition & context

What the term means, with a canonical example and a memorable analogy a creator would quote.

Trend
Trend + projection

Where the signal is going in 6 months, with historical analogs and a confidence rating.

Why now
Why it's emerging now

Four forces, cited to primary sources, balanced on controversy when relevant.

Monetization
Monetization timeline

Now / 3–6 mo / 6–12 mo commercial reads, with revenue signal rating.

Actionables
Story angles + buildables

Content pitches, websites to build, and product ideas with SERP-gap reasoning.

Domains
Domain availability

Variants × TLDs checked live via RDAP — grab the name before it's gone.

From signal to strategy in three steps

1
Signal detection

We scan Hacker News, GitHub, Readwise, and dev communities daily. A cascade pipeline filters mainstream noise and surfaces terms that are new, cross-source, and acquiring momentum.

2
Deep research

Each term gets a full research report — definition, trend projection, why-now analysis, monetization outlook, story angles, and buildable product ideas. Human reviewed.

3
Ready to act

Published Tuesdays. Use the research to write content, pitch newsletters, build products, or register domains before the term trends on Google.

Human-curated, not auto-generated

Human reviewed

Every report is written and checked by a human. No model-only autogen, no scraping spam content.

Primary sources

Every claim cites an external URL you can open — official docs, launch posts, HN threads, GitHub repos.

Balanced on controversy

When a term is contested (license changes, safety claims, author disputes), we name the critics as well as the proponents.

Never miss a new term

5–8 emerging terms every Tuesday. Research, story angles, buildable ideas. Free while we're in early access.

Join the waitlist for issue #1. No spam, unsubscribe any time.