Let the picture settle, because it reframes the whole tool.

A language model is not a person who remembers you and grows alongside you. It is something stranger and simpler: a process that reads one board of text and writes what comes next, then forgets the board ever existed.

Everything you have learned to do with these tools, every clever prompt, every long working session, every "remember that I prefer short answers," is really about one thing. Getting the right text onto that board, and keeping it there.

That is the whole game. The next chapter is about playing it well.