Eugene Meidinger has a primer:
It’s tempting to think that working with LLMs and AI agents doesn’t require understanding anything about how they work. These tools are often presented as autonomous, intelligent, and self-explanatory. They communicate through conversational text, making them feel natural and intuitive, and can often even seem like magic.
In practice, however, these intuitions about LLMs are often very wrong. LLMs are a strange technology. As we stack tools and agent interfaces (or harnesses) on top of them, more and more misunderstandings also stack up. Treating them as an easy button leads to layers of frustration, waste, and, in the worst-case scenario, mistakes.
This is a nice baseline to get someone started with understanding LLM output behavior. It’s not a how-to guide, but rather a “Here’s what’s going on” type of guide. Eugene brings less snark to the topic than I do, but that’s par for the course for anyone who remembers the good ol’ days of the SQL Data Partners podcast.