Term	Definition	Example
Walk me through	(phrasal verb) Explain something to me step by step, so I can follow your reasoning. Say “walk me through the code,” not “explain me the code.”	"Sure. Walk me through what you've checked so far."
I'm not following	A polite way to say you've lost someone's reasoning. “Follow” here means keeping up with their thinking.	"I'm not following — can you back up to the if-statement?"
Go through	(phrasal verb) Review something carefully, together. Both people look; nobody is teaching.	"Let's go through the handler together, top to bottom."
Take the wheel	A friendly driving metaphor for taking over the keyboard. In pair programming you'll more often hear “Can you drive?” or “Want the keyboard?”	"Okay, so my hypothesis is the email service never gets called when the payment status is 'pending.' But I can't figure out why. Can you take the wheel?"
Hypothesis	A guess you can test. “My hypothesis is…” tells your partner you have an idea and a plan to check it.	"My hypothesis is the email only fires on 'confirmed,' but some payments are currently sitting in 'pending' longer than expected."
Sanity check	A quick check of the basics before you look deeper. Also heard as “sense check,” especially in British English.	"Hold on — before we go deeper, let me run a sanity check on the config. Sometimes the simplest explanation is a misconfigured environment variable."
Rubber-duck	To explain a problem out loud, step by step, until you find the answer yourself. Used as a noun, a verb (“I just rubber-ducked it”) and in “rubber-duck debugging.”	"Wait — I think I just rubber-ducked it. The retry fires before the status updates to 'confirmed,' so the email check runs against 'pending' and skips it."
Background	The context someone needs before you go into detail. Recycled from Episode 6, now used between developers.	"Let me give you some background on this module before I dive in."
Currently	At the moment. Not the same as “actually,” which means “in fact.” Recycled from Episode 6.	"The email service is currently triggered by that webhook."
Edge case	A rare situation the code doesn't handle — here, payments that need a retry. Recycled from Episode 4.	"That's the edge case. The API processes the payment, but the webhook fires before the status callback lands."

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