LLMs behave like MCMC: prompt chains that climb but never backtrack

TricklerHQ · x · 2026-08-25

@TricklerHQ proposes that current LLMs and their usage resemble a reward-seeking stochastic process like MCMC—each incremental prompt pushes toward a higher energy state and never backtracks. Context from the exchange: LLMs will always need a harness of some kind that provides "sense organs" and capabilities, and all the nudges and rewrites we do are a function of the models still being bad—though a skeptic counters that models this dumb shouldn't manage long-running tasks at all.

Related event: Debates Flare Over RL Environment Requirements and MCMC Analogies for LLMs(7 posts)→

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