How AI coding works (sellable depth)

The goal is not to become an ML engineer. It is to explain why context changes everything and to know exactly where the honest limits are, because a technical buyer will test both.

Start with the idea that earns you the room: retrieval over a codebase. A plain autocomplete predicts the next token from the file in front of it. Cursor pulls relevant code from across the repository into the model's working context, so a suggestion can respect your actual interfaces, your naming conventions and the function three directories away that the change depends on. That gap between "completes the line" and "understands my repo" is the whole differentiator and it is the thing you should be able to explain in plain language.