15 posts found
What a large language model actually predicts
A model does not look anything up and does not decide what is true. It estimates which token comes next. Almost everythi...
Why temperature changes the answer, not the knowledge
Turning temperature down does not make a model more accurate. It makes it more repeatable — and confusing the two is how...
Embeddings explained without the linear algebra
An embedding turns text into coordinates, and nearby coordinates mean related meaning. That single idea is what makes se...
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...
Why models hallucinate, and what actually reduces it
Hallucination is not a glitch that a better model will one day remove. It is what generation does when it has nothing to...
System prompts: the instructions the user never sees
A system prompt sets the rules for everything that follows. Written well it is the cheapest quality improvement availabl...
Structured output beats parsing prose
If your code needs a value from a model, ask for JSON and validate it. Regexing an answer out of a paragraph is a bug wa...
Tool calling is an API contract the model can read
A tool definition is documentation with a schema attached. Write it for a capable colleague who has never seen your syst...
Giving an agent memory without giving it amnesia
Memory is not a feature you enable. It is a set of decisions about what to keep, what to summarise and what to let go —...
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...
RAG in one page: retrieve, rank, answer
Retrieval-augmented generation is three steps and a lot of tuning. The architecture is simple; the quality lives almost...