Basis Lab

Putting a model into service

Compose the input a model actually sees, deliberately and with a budget, deciding what is worth the room it takes, where retrieved material goes, and how to tell an improvement from a coincidence when you change the wording

Writing What the Model Reads

The input is a thing you design, not a thing you type. Structure, budget, retrieved material, and how to know whether a change to the wording helped.

8 lessons, written and corrected before you arrived. Reading them here needs no account. The first reads the whole way through; the others open and then stop, because a page nobody owns cannot tell who is reading it. Starting the course gives you your own copy, where every idea has problems standing under it and you can ask about any sentence.

Start reading

This is course 1 of 9 in a reading track: put a model in front of people and know whether it is working. The track is an order, not a gate, and the rest of it is on one page.

  1. 01What the Model Actually SeesAlmost nobody has printed the complete input their own feature sends. Doing it once, and accounting for every part, is the start of treating it as a designed object.
  2. 02Instructions That Survive Contactopening onlyA rule that reads well to a person often fails on the odd input. What survives is positive, specific, one job at a time, and tested on the cases that break it.
  3. 03Showing Instead of Explainingopening onlyThree worked examples usually beat three paragraphs of description, and the examples have to cover the awkward cases, because everything in them is copied exactly.
  4. 04Asking for a Shapeopening onlyWhen a program has to read the answer, the shape has to be specified, validated and repaired, because it will come back broken often enough to matter.
  5. 05The Room Is Finiteopening onlyInstructions, examples, retrieved material and the answer itself all compete for the same space. A budget decides what goes in and, more usefully, what goes first.
  6. 06Putting Retrieved Material Inopening onlyFetched passages have to be labelled as material rather than instruction, placed so they are used instead of memory, and tied to the answer by asking for citations.
  7. 07Where Things Get Lostopening onlyThe same sentence placed in the middle of a long input is used less often than at either end, which makes position a design decision rather than an accident of assembly.
  8. 08Knowing a Change Helpedopening onlyA fixed set of cases, run before and after, is the only thing that distinguishes an improvement from a change. One impressive answer proves nothing at all.