A field guide, in four parts and counting

Model Mechanics

How large language models work and how to work with them.

  1. 1

    Inside an LLM: Corpus to Next Token

    Follow the full lifecycle: corpus and tokenizer, learned vectors and the transformer block, the pre-training that chooses the numbers, and one-token-at-a-time decoding.

  2. 2

    Reasoning Effort

    The knob buys serial compute. Its returns are concave and task-dependent. How to set it without superstition.

  3. 3

    Orchestration and Subagents

    One context window is the wrong shape for big work. Fan-out, pipelines, and verification with a return contract.

  4. 4

    Loops and Skills

    The while-loop that turns a text predictor into a worker, and procedure packaged as files an agent loads on demand.

  5. 5

    Harness Engineering

    The software around the model: tools, permissions, context budgets, and feedback design. In preparation.