My Throw Decides My Aim: How LLM Generation Order Upends Our Intuition About Intent

My Throw Decides My Aim

The author uses a song lyric to unpack how LLMs reverse our intuition about intent. Tokens are generated step by step, and direction emerges during generation rather than from a pre-formed thought. Anthropic's research shows Claude plans rhymes ahead when writing poetry, but the explanation it gives afterward is another generated continuation—not a faithful transcript of internal state. The post frames this as 'throw first, then draw the bullseye,' and warns that confident model explanations are themselves new throws.

Why it matters: A substantive personal essay that uses 'my throw decides my aim' to explain how LLM direction emerges token by token rather than being pre-planned. Cites Anthropic's rhyme-planning research and distinguishes model behavior from model self-explanation — solid information densit...