How AI Agents Work Part 1: Guessing the Next Token

sethjuarez · x · 2026-08-26

The first post in a new series explaining how AI agents work, starting from the plumbing. It breaks down that an LLM does exactly one thing: guess the next token. The post explains the process of tokenization (e.g., Byte-Pair Encoding) where text is split into chunks and converted to integer IDs. The thesis is that all agentic capabilities are just a runtime wrapped around this single mechanic.

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