Taxonomy

Taxonomy

A closed vocabulary. Free-text tags rot into ai-agent / ai-agents / agents within a month and destroy every filter, so unknown terms fail the build with a suggestion.

Adding a term is a normal, welcome contribution — open a PR against data/taxonomy.json with a one-line definition.

Categories

Category	What is in it
data-extraction	Scrapers, crawlers, datasets, and extraction products whose central question concerns collecting usable data.
crypto-onchain	Anything that touches a blockchain: token launches, contracts, wallets, MEV, on-chain data.
ai-agents	Autonomous or semi-autonomous agent systems, harnesses, and multi-agent coordination.
ml-research	Model behaviour, architecture experiments, benchmarks, and training-side work.
tooling-infra	Developer tools, CLIs, MCP servers, deployment and hosting plumbing.
web-saas	Web apps and products with users and a front end.
games	Games, game plugins, bots, and simulations.
security-audit	Auditing, scanning, exploit research, and defensive tooling.
content-media	Video, writing, publishing pipelines, and distribution surfaces.
automation-ops	Scheduled work, crons, scrapers, back-office automation, internal ops.
experiments	One-offs and probes that do not belong to a category yet.

Tag axes

Every idea carries at least one domain tag, at least one mechanic tag, and exactly one stage tag.

Domain — what the work was about

Tag	Meaning
apify-actors	Building and operating actors on the Apify platform.
data-quality	Measuring completeness, accuracy, freshness, and usefulness of collected data.
token-launch	Deploying or launching tokens.
smart-contracts	Writing, deploying, or reading contracts.
trading	Buying, selling, arbitrage, market making.
onchain-data	Reading and indexing chain state.
scraping	Extracting data from sites and APIs.
browser-automation	Driving a real browser programmatically.
rag	Retrieval-augmented generation and vector search.
agent-harness	The scaffolding an agent runs inside.
multi-agent	More than one agent coordinating.
prompt-engineering	Getting a model to do the thing reliably.
model-eval	Benchmarking and comparing models.
fine-tuning	Training or adapting a model.
api-integration	Building on somebody else's API.
mcp	Model Context Protocol servers and clients.
cli-tooling	Command-line tools.
serverless	Workers, edge functions, and their limits.
static-site	Static hosting and site generation.
payments	Taking money: processors, invoices, payouts.
marketplace	Listing on somebody else's storefront or index.
content-pipeline	Producing media at volume.
seo-geo	Being found by search engines and answer engines.
game-bot	Automating a game client.
desktop-automation	Driving a desktop OS programmatically.

Mechanic — what decided the outcome

See Mechanics for why this axis matters.

Tag	Meaning
repeat-demand	Observed repeat usage or purchases sustained the product.
output-correctness	The correctness or completeness of produced data decided the result.
rate-limits	A throughput cap was the binding constraint.
distribution-gap	It worked and nobody found it. The classic killer.
cold-start	Needed users/liquidity/data it could not bootstrap.
unit-economics	Each unit cost more than it earned.
api-undocumented-behavior	The API did something the docs did not say.
silent-failure	It reported success while doing nothing.
platform-ban	An account, wallet, or app was banned or blocked.
tos-boundary	Ran into what the terms of service allow.
free-tier-ceiling	The free plan ran out before the idea proved out.
capital-required	Needed money up front that we would not risk.
oversaturated	The market already had a hundred of these.
craft-floor	Output quality was below what anyone would pay for.
maintenance-cost	Kept working but cost too much attention to keep alive.
upstream-change	A dependency changed and broke it.
verification-gap	We could not tell whether it was actually working.
wrong-abstraction	Built the wrong shape and had to restart.
self-hosting-loop	The thing maintains itself, so nobody has to remember to.
scope-creep	Grew until it could not ship.
worked-as-designed	The thing did what it said. Rare enough to tag.
found-by-index	An existing index or marketplace did the distribution for us.
zero-marginal-cost	Scaled without the cost scaling.

Stage — how far it got

Tag	Meaning
idea-only	Written down, never built.
prototyped	Built enough to run locally.
deployed	Live somewhere a stranger could reach.
monetized	Took money from someone.

Aliases

These are rejected with a pointer to the canonical term, so near-duplicates cannot creep in:

Written	Use instead
agents	multi-agent
ai-agent	agent-harness
agent	agent-harness
crypto	smart-contracts
web3	smart-contracts
defi	trading
llm	prompt-engineering
prompting	prompt-engineering
evals	model-eval
benchmark	model-eval
seo	seo-geo
geo	seo-geo
cron	serverless
workers	serverless
no-users	distribution-gap
nobody-came	distribution-gap
too-expensive	unit-economics
banned	platform-ban
ratelimit	rate-limits
rate-limited	rate-limits