[balder1991]

Basically, I’d say the LLM doesn’t have a “theory” of anything that wasn’t in its training. It’ll always treat your project as if it was reading a book for the first time.

As an example, if you chat with an LLM it can sort of explain concepts it learned in its training, because it created some internal representation of them. However it’ll never be able to explain things about your project unless you tell it (then it can simply repeat it, which is the same RAG does, the LLM is just spitting it out without any deep understanding of it).

You can try to cram as much context to it as possible and overload it with extra information, or you can understand this difference and separate a task that you know the LLM can handle because you’ll be able to leverage its knowledge and judge the final work yourself.

But this distinction needs to be more clear, I think. The LLM doesn’t have any deep understanding of anything you’re creaming into the context window the same way it does with concepts it learned during training from millions of examples and building some internal model of the concepts and their relationships.