Recently whenever I attend AI meetups or tech events, I keep hearing terms like:

Gen AI

Agents

Agentic AI

MCP

Orchestration

RAG

Guardrails

AI SDKs

Initially, everything sounded like the same thing to me 😄

Every conversation felt like:

new framework new tool new buzzword

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At one point, I was honestly confused:

Are these tools? architectures? libraries? concepts?

But slowly, I started understanding something.

These are not random competing things.

They are actually different layers in the AI ecosystem.

That realization made things much easier for me.

The way I understood it

Gen AI Models ↓ AI SDKs ↓ Orchestration ↓ Agents ↓ Agentic Systems ↓ Guardrails

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