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Fundamentals

Prompt Caching: Stop Paying for the Same Tokens Twice

Prompt caching reuses the prefill work for a repeated prefix, cutting cost and first-token latency. The whole technique comes down to one ordering rule.

· 9 min read
Fundamentals

Quantization Explained: Big Models on Smaller Hardware

Quantization shrinks model weights to fewer bits so they fit in less memory. Here is how the formats differ, what accuracy you lose, and how to pick one without guessing.

· 9 min read
Fundamentals

RAG vs Long Context: Retrieval Did Not Become Obsolete

Large context windows were supposed to kill retrieval. They did not. Here is how the two actually compare on cost, accuracy and latency — and when to use each.

· 8 min read
Fundamentals

Reasoning Models Explained: When Thinking Longer Helps

Reasoning models spend extra tokens working before they answer. Here is what that changes mechanically, which tasks it helps, and where it is just an expensive delay.

· 9 min read
Fundamentals

Speculative Decoding: Faster Output, Identical Tokens

Speculative decoding drafts several tokens cheaply and verifies them in one pass, cutting latency without changing the output distribution. How it works.

· 8 min read
Fundamentals

System Prompts: What They Actually Do and How to Write One

A system prompt is not a control panel and not a security boundary. Here is what it really is, where it sits in the instruction hierarchy, and how to write one.

· 9 min read
Fundamentals

Temperature, Top-p and Sampling: What the Knobs Really Do

Temperature is not a creativity dial and top-p is not a quality setting. Here is what each sampling parameter changes mathematically, and how to set them for real work.

· 8 min read
Fundamentals

Tokenization Explained: Why Your Bill Is Not About Words

Tokenizers decide what your prompt costs, how long your context really is, and why models miscount letters. Here is how subword tokenization works in practice.

· 8 min read
Fundamentals

What Is a Parameter Count, and Does It Matter?

Parameter counts are the most quoted and least understood model spec. What they measure, why total and active differ, and when the number predicts anything useful.

· 8 min read
Fundamentals

Why LLMs Hallucinate, and What Actually Reduces It

Hallucination is not a bug that will be patched out. It follows from the training objective and from how we grade models. Here is the mechanism and the mitigations that work.

· 9 min read
Fundamentals

Why the Same Prompt Gives You a Different Answer

Temperature zero is not determinism, and a seed is only best effort. Here is where LLM nondeterminism really comes from and how to build around it.

· 9 min read

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