13 posts found
Tokens, not words: how a model reads your text
Models do not see characters or words. They see tokens — and once you know how text becomes tokens, several odd behaviou...
Training, fine-tuning and prompting are three different tools
Teams reach for fine-tuning when they need context, and for prompting when they need behaviour. Knowing which problem ea...
The context window is a budget, not a memory
Bigger context windows did not give models memory. They gave you a larger envelope to fill on every single request — and...
Choosing between a large model and a small one
Most production traffic does not need the largest model available. Routing by task rather than defaulting to the top of...
What an AI agent can actually do with a design system
Given a real design system, a model stops inventing interfaces and starts assembling them. The difference is not the mod...
Design tokens are the interface AI needs
A token that only names a hex value has saved you nothing. A token that names a job tells a model which decision it is m...
Generating layouts that respect a grid
Generated layouts usually look almost right, and "almost" is where the eye catches. Most of the fix is stating the rules...
Why component names matter more with AI in the loop
A human reads a bad component name and opens the file. A model reads it and guesses. Naming quietly became an interface...
Reviewing AI-generated UI: a checklist
Generated interfaces fail in a predictable set of places. Knowing which ones turns review from a vague unease into a lis...
Prompt caching: the cheapest speedup you are not using
If every request begins with the same two thousand tokens of instructions, you are paying full price to resend them. Ord...
Rate limits, retries and the backoff you actually need
Every AI feature meets a 429 eventually. Whether that is a blip or an outage depends on retry logic written before you n...
The cost model of an AI feature
Per-token pricing looks trivial until you multiply by retries, conversation history and the context you resend on every...