Prompt
A prompt is the input you send to an AI model. But it's more than your typed message — the full input the model receives includes system instructions set by the developer, previous conversation history, and any additional context. The model doesn't know what you meant to say, only what the prompt contains. Writing clearly and precisely is therefore one of the most practical skills in working with AI.
Videos explaining this concept
E007Notes on AI
What AI Receives When You Send a Prompt
A Prompt is commonly misunderstood as the sole input to an AI model. In reality, it is only the visible "Top Slice" of a larger input stack, best understood as a Prompt Sandwich.
E008Notes on AI
Is AI a Student or an Actor
We often mistake AI outputs for fact-checked answers from a reasoning process. In reality, AI generates completions—continuations of patterns, similar to an Improvisational Actor following the rule...
E009Notes on AI
What AI Is Good At vs Bad At
This episode introduces a practical framework for understanding when to use AI by framing it as a "special employee" with three distinct characteristics.
E010Notes on AI
The 5-Sentence Mental Model of GenAI
This episode provides a checkpoint after the foundational episodes, compressing the key concepts into five memorable sentences that serve as a mental compass for AI.
E014Notes on AI
Context Window
The context window is the amount of information a model can see at one time. It's not memory — it's working space. The model can only reason about what is currently visible. At any moment, it recei...
E015Notes on AI
Context Engineering
Context engineering is the practice of shaping the information environment the model operates in — not just writing better prompts. The prompt is not what the model responds to. It responds to the ...
E020Notes on AI
Why Long Chats Get Confused
The LLM inside a chatbot has no memory. Every response is generated fresh from the same frozen trained model -- it doesn't retain anything between responses and doesn't become smarter as you chat. ...