Every PrepMint guide filed under How it works — 9 articles, written from using the tools and checked against the vendor's own documentation.
How it works · 11 min read
Strawberry has two r's, your 100-word answer runs to 137, and the limerick does not rhyme. Those are not three mistakes. Text becomes tokens before the model sees it, and everything below the token — letters, characters, sounds — was discarded at the door.
How it works · 11 min read
You asked for five things and got one, with a confident summary and no error. An agent loop ends when the model writes a message containing no tool call — a judgement nothing checks against your task. The five ways a run ends early, each fingerprint, and the phrasing that fixes it.
How it works · 11 min read
The session was fast for twenty turns, then you added one line to the top of a file and the next answer crawled. A prompt cache is keyed on an exact prefix, so cost and latency depend on where you changed something, not how much. The ordering rule that falls out of it.
How it works · 9 min read
Every assistant offers the same five containers for an instruction, and the same sentence is a permanent rule in one and a single-turn suggestion in another. The placement rule across vendors: what survives a new conversation, what survives a context trim, what gets re-billed every turn, and what outranks what.
How it works · 10 min read
Indexing says synced, the file is open, and Cursor still answers as if your code does not exist. Follow one request end to end: what gets attached, what gets injected, what the agent decides to search for, what three ignore files remove, and what gets compressed away.
How it works · 9 min read
You changed nothing and the answer changed anyway. A mental model of what actually varies between two runs of an identical prompt: sampling that never fully stops, a context window that grows every turn, a system prompt the vendor rewrites, memory you cannot see, and infrastructure that moves under a pinned model.
How it works · 11 min read
The code ran, and it was wrong. When a model answers about a library you did not paste, it is answering from weights with a date on them — and nothing in the output distinguishes what it knows from what it reconstructed. The four fingerprints of stale parametric knowledge, and the habit that fixes most of them.
How it works · 11 min read
You wrote the rule, then pasted an example under it to help — and the output matched the example. A demonstration is a stronger signal than a description, it shows everything about itself rather than the one property you meant, and nothing warns you when the two disagree.
How it works · 9 min read
The docs specify how to define a subagent and never state what it inherits. A subagent starts on an empty context window, the delegation prompt is the only thing that crosses, and only its final message comes back — so it re-reads files you already read, and that is the feature working.