Key terms and concepts in web development, AI, and software engineering explained in plain language.
Progressive enhancement is a web development strategy that starts with a baseline of functional HTML content accessible to all browsers, then layers on CSS styling and JavaScript interactivity for more capable environments. This approach ensures that core functionality works everywhere, while users with modern browsers get a richer experience. It contrasts with graceful degradation, which starts with the full experience and tries to handle failures.
Prompt engineering is the practice of crafting and optimizing input instructions to guide AI models toward producing desired outputs. Techniques include few-shot examples, chain-of-thought reasoning, role assignment, and structured output formatting. Effective prompt engineering can dramatically improve the quality, accuracy, and consistency of LLM responses without modifying the underlying model.
Props drilling is the practice of passing data through multiple levels of intermediate components that don't actually use the data themselves, just to get it to a deeply nested child that needs it. This creates tight coupling between components and makes refactoring painful. Common solutions include React's Context API for global-ish state, state management libraries like Zustand or Redux, or component composition patterns that restructure the tree to reduce nesting depth.