A short book
AI, from the
Parts Up
You hear "tokens," "prompts," "agents" and "Claude Code," but nobody showed you the parts. This short book shows you each one, in plain English, with sources.
- Model
- Prompt
- Harness
- Tools
"I'm a machine and you're a machine, and we both think, don't we?"
Steve Sparks
1st web edition · October 2026
- John Horgan, "Claude E. Shannon," Scientific American 262, no. 1 (January 1990): 22–22B, https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican0190-22; reprinted in edited form in John Horgan, "Profile of Claude Shannon, Inventor of Information Theory," Scientific American (Cross-Check blog), July 26, 2017, scientificamerican.com, where Shannon is answering whether machines could "think"; also quoted in Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), chap. 23. ↩