Rapid Fire: LLM Fundamentals
Question → 3-line answer, flashcard style.
Prerequisites
LLM Fundamentals — work through the full section first. This deck strengthens recall of material you already understand; it will quietly fail you on material you don't.
How to use this deck
Cover the answer. Read only the question. Say your answer out loud, in full sentences, as if explaining it to someone who hasn't read the page. Then uncover and compare — not "did I know it?" but did I say it as cleanly as that?
Recognising an answer feels almost identical to being able to produce one, and the two come apart the moment you have to actually explain something. Anything you couldn't say fluently is a signal to reread its full page, one click away below.
Core mechanics
Card 1 of 5
How does an LLM generate text?
Tokens and context
Card 1 of 3
What is a token?
Sampling and determinism
Card 1 of 3
What does temperature do?
Prompting and structured output
Card 1 of 5
Zero-shot vs few-shot prompting?
APIs, streaming, caching
Card 1 of 2
How does streaming work at the protocol level?
Hallucination
Card 1 of 2
Why do LLMs hallucinate?
Full treatment: LLM Fundamentals — the mechanisms behind every answer above.