Interactive explainer, three floors
The Word Machine
How a large language model actually works, one guessing game at a time, told as a dungeon crawl. Seventeen hand-built toys you can poke, and a vocabulary you'll own by the end.
- Floor 1The monster itself: the next-word machine, from embeddings to fabrication
- Floor 2Behind the glass: transcripts, inference, thinking, effort, and vision
- Floor 3The harness: agents, tools, rules files, subagents, wards, and the map
September 2026