Dictionary

Generative AI is a category of artificial intelligence that creates new content — text, images, code, music, or video — rather than just analyzing or classifying existing data. Powered by architectures like transformers and diffusion models, generative AI has transformed software development with tools like GitHub Copilot, Claude, and Cursor. It represents a shift from AI as a classification tool to AI as a creative collaborator.

Git hooks are scripts that Git executes automatically before or after events like commits, pushes, and merges. Common examples include pre-commit hooks that run linters and formatters, commit-msg hooks that enforce message conventions, and pre-push hooks that run tests. Tools like Husky and lint-staged make it easy to manage hooks across a team, catching issues before they reach the remote repository.

GitHub Actions is a CI/CD and workflow automation platform built directly into GitHub. Developers define workflows in YAML files that trigger on events like pushes, pull requests, or schedules, running jobs on GitHub-hosted or self-hosted runners. Its marketplace offers thousands of reusable actions for tasks like linting, testing, deploying, and publishing packages.

GitOps is an operational model where Git repositories serve as the single source of truth for both application code and infrastructure configuration. Automated agents like ArgoCD or Flux continuously monitor the repo and synchronize the live environment to match the declared state. Every change goes through pull requests, providing a full audit trail and enabling rollbacks by simply reverting a commit.