TL;DR: you only truly understand a system once you rebuild it. I recoded TCP at school, then the DNS protocol, then Modbus, each time to understand it from the inside. A colleague just went through this with LLMs. He wrote a small agent in Go, and he finally understood tooling and the context window. An LLM is just one more system to demystify. Rebuild a tiny version, and you move from user to engineer.
For developers who want to master LLMs, not just use them.
A colleague, a Go agent, a click
This week, I am helping a colleague level up on LLMs. I explain the concepts. Context, tokens, tools. A token is a small piece of text the model reads and counts. He listens, but something does not click.
Then he comes back, delighted. He wrote a small CLI in Go. A plain chat loop that calls a model and runs its tools. And now he gets it. The tooling, the context window, the loop. Not because I explained it. Because he rebuilt it.
