IDInternals Decoded
Articles

Everything we know, handed over.

Deep dives into the internals of AI, explained conversationally. Every one is free to read in full, with nothing held back for a signup.

Deep DivesAgent Memory: The Four Kinds and How They Fit TogetherLLMs forget everything between calls. In-context, external, episodic, and semantic memory fix that.8 min
Advanced
Deep DivesAgentic RAG: When the Retriever Starts ThinkingQuery rewriting, multi-step retrieval, and agents that decide what to look up.13 min
Intermediate
ExplainersAI Benchmarks, Explained: What MMLU and Friends Actually MeasureHow to read a benchmark table without being fooled by it.10 min
Beginner
PlaybooksAI for Documents and Spreadsheets That Actually Saves HoursDrafting, summarizing, cleaning data, and building formulas with AI, step by step.10 min
Beginner
PlaybooksAI for Meetings and Email: Reclaim Your CalendarNotes, action items, drafts, and follow-ups on autopilot, without sounding like a robot.10 min
Beginner
PlaybooksAI Privacy at Work: What You Can and Can't PasteCompany data, customer data, and AI tools: the rules that keep you out of trouble.9 min
Beginner
ExplainersAttention, Gently: How Models Decide What MattersThe mechanism behind the magic, explained with zero math.14 min
Beginner
Deep DivesBatching and PagedAttention: How vLLM Serves Thousands at OnceContinuous batching and paged memory: the two ideas behind modern serving throughput.11 min
Advanced
ProtocolsBuild Your First MCP ServerTools, resources, and prompts: a working server from scratch, explained line by line.11 min
Intermediate
PlaybooksBuilding Your Personal AI StackA concrete, affordable setup for professionals, from free tier to power user.10 min
Beginner
PlaybooksChain of Thought: When Thinking Out Loud HelpsStep-by-step reasoning improves hard tasks and wastes tokens on easy ones. Know the difference.11 min
Intermediate
Deep DivesChunking: The Decision Everything Downstream InheritsSizes, overlap, and semantic boundaries. Get this wrong and nothing after it can save you.20 min
Intermediate
PlaybooksClaude Code + Your IDE: A Workflow That CompoundsWhere the terminal agent beats the IDE, where it doesn't, and how to run both for maximum output.9 min
Intermediate
PlaybooksClaude Code vs Cursor: How Each One ThinksTerminal agent vs AI-native IDE: context strategies, strengths, and the tasks each wins.9 min
Intermediate
PlaybooksCLAUDE.md: How Claude Code Thinks About Your ProjectThe one file that changes everything: project memory, conventions, and context strategy.8 min
Intermediate
Deep DivesContext Window Management for Big JobsChunking, map-reduce, and retrieval: how agents handle work that never fits in one context window.14 min
Advanced
Deep DivesContext Windows Are Not What You ThinkA million tokens on the label doesn't mean a million tokens of attention. Lost-in-the-middle, explained.12 min
Intermediate
ExplainersContext Windows: The Model's Working MemoryWhat fits, what falls out, and why long conversations get weird.9 min
Beginner
Deep DivesDebugging Agent Systems: Traces, Replays, Root CausesAgent failures raise no errors. The logging, tracing, and replay toolkit that makes them debuggable.11 min
Advanced
PlaybooksDesigning Your Personal AI Coding WorkflowA concrete system: which tool, which task, which guardrails, and when to just write it yourself.16 min
Intermediate
ExplainersDiffusion: How Image Generators Actually DrawNoise, denoising, and guidance: the process behind every generated image you've seen.10 min
Advanced
ExplainersDocument AI: How Models Read PDFs, Tables, and ReceiptsOCR to layout understanding: the unglamorous vision task every business needs.13 min
Advanced
PlaybooksDynamic Prompts: Context Injected at RuntimePrompts that adapt to the user, the history, and the task, assembled on the fly.11 min
Intermediate
Deep DivesEmbeddings and Vector Search, DemystifiedCosine similarity, dimensions, and what 'semantic' actually buys you.12 min
Intermediate
The Newsletter

Keep up with AI. One email a week.

One thoughtful email each week. Unsubscribe whenever you like.