17 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Why agents fail on long tasks
An agent that handles five steps beautifully can fall apart at twenty. The reason is rarely reasoning — it is that the c...
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...