Under the Hood · a series · 6 parts
How AI actually works.
Six pieces, one car — taken apart part by part: the engine, the memory it carries, who's at the wheel, the wheels, the gauges, and the driver that makes it all move. Each lands one idea in plain English, with the real mechanics waiting right below. Read any one cold; read them in order and they build one machine in your head.
Stop polishing the engine
The model was never the bottleneck. The harness around it was.
The genius and the desk
Why working memory, not intelligence, is the real limit.
Tell it who to be
How a persona quietly changes every answer you get.
The wheels
A model without tools is a brain that can only talk. Tools — and MCP — are the wheels.
Why code got solved first
It gets reliable only where the world keeps score — the gauges it learns from.
The destination, not the route
The finale: you give it the destination, and the whole car drives itself there.