sf-isms.
sf-isms.
The lexicon of San Francisco tech, catalogued with the seriousness it does not entirely deserve. Origins traced, posts cited, sincerity indeterminate.
47 entries · peer review conducted on the timeline · submissions open
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- 7 girls of SF (noun)The running census claim that San Francisco contains exactly seven women, all of whom you have met, all of whom are at this party. Not literally true; directionally, hard to argue with.
- 996 (noun)Working 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. Invented in Chinese tech, made illegal in China in 2021, and now advertised in SF job postings as a perk.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- IQmog (verb)To dominate on raw intelligence what you lose on polish. From Sam Altman's claim that OpenAI still gets looksmaxxed on frontend but IQmogs hard now: the UI is uglier, the model is smarter, checkmate.
- Karl the Fog (noun)The San Francisco fog, as a character. Named Karl by a pseudonymous parody account in 2010; now it's just what the city calls the weather.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Uggmaxxing (verb)The opposite of looksmaxing: deliberately looking as bad as possible (Uggs, hoodie, the 11th-grade haircut) so zero time goes into your appearance and all of it goes into the startup. Not letting go. Locking in. Strictly temporary: you uggmaxx until the milestone, then re-enter society.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- YC–a16z singles mixer (noun)A singles mixer for YC and a16z Speedrun founders. No VCs allowed unless they're very cool. Proposed as a bit, then inevitable: the obvious event for a city where everyone is single until Series B.
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