Chapter 1 – How LLMs Work

When you start building chatbots, it can feel like you’re whispering instructions into a black box and hoping for the best. Sometimes the bot nails the personality you want. Other times, it drifts into generic replies or forgets what you told it minutes ago.

The difference isn’t luck. It comes from how Large Language Models (LLMs) actually process information. If you understand tokens, memory limits, pretraining, and prompt structure, you stop guessing and start designing with intent.

Think of this chapter as the anatomy lesson before we learn how to perform surgery.