Authority: Why We Obey First and Think Later

We think we’re giving orders. We’re steering a next-token engine. Prompts work when they mirror patterns the model has seen. Tiny phrasing changes flip outcomes. Guide with short roles, small examples, and simple formats. Verify. Cooperation, not command.

Seniority isn’t a title. It’s how you work when it counts: choose the boring tool when it wins, ship with guardrails, teach without theater, cut complexity, and own outcomes after merge. Tradeoffs over tricks. Clarity over clever. Spotlight traded for team lift.

We sort words without thinking. Machines can't. They learn to draw boundaries and find themes: spam or not, tickets by topic. Use labels when you need decisions and clusters when you need discovery. Start there. Patterns come first, meaning follows.

Ask a question, get a fluent answer. Under the hood, no insight, just a fast loop picking the next token, guided by attention and a tiny memory. See the gears, not a ghost. When you learn the strings, you know when to trust it and when to steer.

Language models don’t read like we do. They slice text into tokens and map them to vectors. Meaning becomes pattern, not understanding. Learn the quirks of tokenization and embeddings to write tighter prompts, spot bias, and know what gets lost.