Your LLM Prompt Isn't Being Read the Way You Think (opens in new tab)

The simple version When you write a prompt, you’re thinking in terms of meaning and intent. The model is doing something much stranger: predicting which tokens are statistically likely to follow the ones you gave it. Those two things often produce similar results, but when they don’t, the gap is confusing. You’re not giving instructions. You’re setting a context. The mental model most people bring to prompting is roughly: write instructions, get output. It’s the natural way to think about it,...