cracked
In plain wordsTech slang praising someone as exceptionally, almost unfairly, skilled; a 'cracked engineer' is a prodigy who ships remarkable work very fast.
Exceptionally skilled, productive or talented, especially at engineering or research; applied to individuals ('a cracked engineer'), teams and occasionally models. In AI-industry usage the word connotes youth, intensity and unconventional credentials — a cracked engineer may lack degrees but ship at extraordinary speed — and it pervades recruiting rhetoric, founders' descriptions of small elite teams, and talk of the 2025 talent war, when frontier labs offered individual researchers pay packages reported in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. It is also used ironically to mock hustle culture and the mythology of the lone genius.
They only have six people, but every one of them is cracked.
Origin
From gaming slang of the late 2010s, notably among Fortnite players, where a 'cracked' player was implausibly skilled; the sense may draw on 'cracked' (hacked) software or 'cracked out', and echoes the much older 'crack' meaning first-rate, as in 'crack shot'. It migrated to startup and AI social media around 2022–2023 and was ubiquitous in Silicon Valley hiring talk by 2024–2025.
Related
- GPU poorGPU poor, adj.: Slang for researchers, startups or countries without access to the huge numbers of expensive chips needed to build the most advanced AI, as opposed to the GPU-rich big labs.
- -pilled-pilled, adj.: A slang word ending meaning someone has been won over to a belief, often suddenly and completely; 'AGI-pilled' means convinced that human-level AI is coming soon.
- it's over, we're so backit's over, we're so back, phr.: A meme describing the mood swings of the AI world: one day bad news means 'it's over', the next a new model or result means 'we're so back'.
- feel the AGIfeel the AGI, phr.: An AI-industry catchphrase meaning to grasp, emotionally as well as intellectually, that human-level AI may be arriving soon; it began as a chant inside OpenAI.
- AI-nativeAI-native, adj.: Describes a product, company or person built around AI from the start, rather than one that added AI features to older ways of working.
Mentioned in
it's over, we're so backit's over, we're so back, phr.: A meme describing the mood swings of the AI world: one day bad news means 'it's over', the next a new model or result means 'we're so back'.