How to Check Whether an AI Citation Actually Supports a Claim
An AI citation supports a claim only when the cited source, read in context, actually states that claim. This guide explains how to resolve citations, compare claims…
FROM THE AUTHOR
John C. Mullen
Explore the published guides and contributions from John C. Mullen.
87 published articlesDesigning a Draft-First AI Publishing Workflow: Briefs, Review Gates, and Handoffs
A draft-first publishing workflow treats the draft as a scoped, reviewable artifact produced against an approved brief rather than text generated ad hoc and pasted into a…
How Context Length Affects Local AI Memory Usage
Raising a local model's context window from 2K to 32K changed generation speed by essentially nothing in a published llama.cpp sweep, but added about 1.7 GB of…
What Quantization Changes in a Language Model (and What It Leaves Alone)
Quantization rewrites a model's weights in lower precision while leaving its architecture, tokenizer, and parameter count intact. The memory savings are predictable; the quality cost is not,…
Prompt Engineering: A Practical Guide to Instructions, Examples, and Evaluation
Prompt engineering is the practice of writing, testing, and revising the instructions given to a language model so its output reliably serves a defined purpose. This guide…
What Are Tokens in AI? A Practical Explanation
A token is the unit of text an AI model actually reads and writes — it can be a single character or a whole word, depending on…
How to Turn a Repeated AI Task into a Reusable Workflow
A reusable AI workflow is not a saved prompt but a small operating procedure with defined inputs, checkpoints, an output format, and acceptance tests. The practical path…
How to Log AI Integration Errors Without Exposing Sensitive Data
Log AI integration errors for the operator, not for the caller or the model. The workable rule is to sanitize at the adapter boundary, return a stable…
Why AI Answers Can Sound Confident and Still Be Wrong
A language model's confident tone is a property of its generated text, not evidence that the claim is true. OpenAI researchers argue that hallucinations persist because training…
AI APIs Explained: Authentication, Tokens, Costs, and Error Handling
AI APIs are metered HTTP interfaces: a credential authorizes the spend, tokens are the billing unit in both directions, and failures arrive as structured status codes rather…
How to Process Bulk AI Writing Jobs with a Queue
Bulk AI writing works best as a two-stage pipeline: a planner creates one durable job per article, and a worker pulls jobs at a controlled rate and…
How to Document a Prompt Experiment for Other Users
A prompt experiment is only reproducible if the record captures more than the prompt text. Document the immutable prompt revision, its variable and output contract, the model…