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Idempotency is a crucial trait in the world of web APIs (and any other system where commands that modify state might need to be retried due to communication failures). It's not a new word or concept, but it's certainly a niche one.

Idempotent is definitely a word that’s strangely awkward and alien to actually use, but makes reasonable sense when the etymology is known.

The closest alternative I can think of is debouncing/debounced

> jargon-heavy

Yes. It’s even worse than jargon tho I think it just invents its own metaphors. At first I thought this was clever and useful, helping me to internalize the code (“the normal path vs the escape hatch”) but I’m increasingly finding the metaphors to be so thick and esoteric that it’s actually a hurdle to understanding the actual code.

Also used in mathematics. A projection P is basically an idempotent mapping, that is P(P(x)) = P(x) for all x.