The LLM Patchbook

A Patchbook guide: short, simple chapters that serve as a conceptual upgrade for software engineers.

Chapters appear below as they are written. Only the chapters listed below exist so far. A total of ~12 chapters are planned.

• Chapter 0: What you will learnA list of things this book can teach you.
• Chapter 1: It sounds more complicated than it actually isAI agents are a handful of primitives, not magic.
• Chapter 1: An agent is a for loopChatGPT, Claude Code, and other agents are just while loops.
• Chapter 2: How to send a chat request to an LLMTalking to an LLM is just a POST request with a sender and a message.
• Chapter 3: Common uses of single API callsSingle API calls are not full agents, but they're already very useful.
• Chapter 3a: SummarizationA zero-shot summarizer. No machine learning required, just an API call.
• Chapter 3b: ClassificationA classifier that used to require ML expertise. Now just an API call.
• Chapter 3c: TransformationTranslation, simplification, and data conversion. Sequence-to-sequence learning, now just an API call.