Awesome Testing

Lesson 10 · Explain and evaluate

If “animal” becomes “robot,” what changes—and how would you test whether the system still works?

Training target revealed

The animal did not cross the street because it was too tired

01 · Smallest useful mechanism

Trace dependencies, then evaluate the behavior that matters

A useful mental model predicts what changes before a run—and identifies what cannot be known without one. Replace “animal” with “robot.” The text changes immediately. Token IDs and sequence length may change, depending on the tokenizer. Different IDs select different initial vectors. From there, attention patterns, residual states, logits, probabilities, and the generated token are model-dependent results that require inference to know exactly. Decoding settings can also change the selected token from the same distribution. The learned model weights do not change during ordinary inference. This trace turns transformer theory into a debugging tool. The final step turns it into an evaluation plan: define the behavior the product needs, test representative and failure cases, and report more than one convenient average.

A prompt edit changes runtime representations; learned weights stay fixed during inference, and product quality still has to be measured.

02 · Experiment

Test the prediction

Learner trace · evidence ledger

Reconstruct the pass from earlier observations, including the pinned GPT-2 snapshot, and distinguish captured model evidence from exact teaching calculations.

Intervention

For every row, name whether your evidence comes from a hand calculation, the GPT-2 course trace, or a local Bonsai comparison.

Thedid not cross the street because it was too …
01Text and token IDsChange immediately and deterministically in the tokenizer.
02Embedding lookupUses different rows for any changed token IDs.
03Attention and residual statesRequire a new forward pass; exact values are model-dependent.
04Logits and probabilitiesRequire inference and may change across the entire vocabulary.
05KV cacheMust represent the modified prefix; stale rows cannot be silently reused.
06Model parametersStay fixed during ordinary inference.

03 · Production-minded practice

Produce a defensible LLM evaluation record

Commit to a written claim and evidence plan. The Lab stores the draft locally and never sends it to a server.

Your learning artifact

Write the argument you would defend

Stored only in this browser. No account required; course reset does not delete it.

Capstone decision rubric

Does the trace justify a product decision?

Ready

The response separates observed values from architectural expectations, pins model and tokenizer revisions, defines representative scenarios, reports uncertainty and failures, and sets a decision threshold.

Incomplete

The response names pipeline components but omits provenance, decoding controls, held-out cases, subgroup analysis, failure severity, or system-level evaluation.

Unsafe

The response treats attention as a complete explanation, a benchmark average as product proof, or fluent output as evidence of factuality, authorization, or hidden reasoning.

04 · Check your understanding

Which component stays fixed during ordinary inference?

Optional referenceDeep dive / reference chapterOpen the complete essay, diagrams, mathematics, exercises, glossary, and sources when you want more depth.

Next: Continue into How Machines Learn for neural-network foundations, enter the AI Agents course to evaluate a complete tool-using system, or rerun this trace with a new prompt.