AI Fundamentals

How language models actually work — tokens, embeddings, context windows — explained with demos you can run and change.

• Why Your Claude Code Prompt Is Not a GuardrailInstructions in a prompt or CLAUDE.md are requests the agent can complete its way around. Deny rules, PreToolUse hooks and files the agent cannot write are enforced outside its turn. Here is the difference, and what we run in production.✓ sourced to official docs
• Grok Bot: What xAI Documents, and What Is Already Wrong OnlinexAI and Cursor shipped Grok Bot in beta on 11 August 2026. Here is what the official documentation actually says, including the shared-computer detail that most coverage has backwards, and why it changes the security question.✓ sourced to official docs
• How Embeddings Work, Counted by HandAn embedding turns a word into numbers so that similar words land near each other. Build real word vectors from your own text, see why cat and dog score alike without ever appearing together, and why similarity is measured by angle rather than distance.✓ sourced to official docs
• What Is a Token? Train a Tokenizer and Watch One FormLanguage models read tokens, not letters or words. Train a real byte-pair encoding tokenizer on your own text, watch the vocabulary build itself merge by merge, and see why models struggle to spell.✓ sourced to official docs
• Temperature and Top-P: The Two Dials, and Why They FightTemperature reshapes the probability distribution over the next token; top-p cuts off its tail. Drag both and watch the arithmetic — including why changing one silently changes what the other does.✓ sourced to official docs
• AGI: One Word, Two Definitions That Do Not AgreeThe argument about whether AGI is close never resolves, and the reason is not the evidence. The word names at least three separate axes, and the major definitions draw the line across different ones. Draw your own and see which you picked.✓ sourced to official docs
• Why ChatGPT Forgets: It Never RememberedA chat model is stateless. Every turn, the app re-sends the entire conversation — which is why long chats start forgetting the beginning, and why they cost far more than the number of words you typed.✓ sourced to official docs
• How Many R's in Strawberry? Why That Question Is UnfairA model that writes working code will confidently miscount the letters in a word. It is not a reasoning failure — the letters were destroyed before the model saw anything. Train a tokenizer and watch it happen.✓ sourced to official docs