LLMs Only Guess Next Tokens; Agency Is Just Scaffolding
sethjuarez · x · 2026-08-31
The article demystifies Large Language Models (LLMs) by stating their singular function: predicting the next token based on input text. The model doesn't "know" answers; it merely calculates the most probable subsequent token ID. Everything deemed "agentic"—from planning to acting—is built as a runtime scaffold around this one mechanic. The text also covers tokenization (e.g., Byte-Pair Encoding), explaining that models operate on sequences of integer IDs, not raw characters. Understanding this primitive is foundational for building advanced Agentic AI.
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