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Lenses, roles and loops

How LLMs and agents work: a prompt as a lens, a role as a model with a description, an agent as a loop, tools as requests, no memory, compression, and focused threads. 13 panels.

Status: draft · book v1.0.0 (the second edition does not exist yet) · gen-z.journalist, 18 October 2026, from Dinis's memo on LLMs and agents. Every line the Guide says, and every quote card, is from the article 'Lenses, roles and loops', word for word; the build checks it. The five lenses on recursion, the weather question and the named threads are the storyboard's illustrations.

The panels

  1. 1. Lenses, roles and loops (cover; Lenses, roles and loops)
  2. 2. One idea, recursion, through five lenses (spectrum; Lenses, roles and loops, A prompt is a lens)
  3. 3. The wrong lens (scene; Lenses, roles and loops, A prompt is a lens)
  4. 4. A role is a model with a description (graph; Lenses, roles and loops, A role is a model with a description)
  5. 5. An agent is a loop with a goal (scene; Lenses, roles and loops, An agent is a loop with a goal)
  6. 6. The loop, with one tool call (graph; Lenses, roles and loops, Tools changed everything; Precisely)
  7. 7. What the next request carries (spectrum; Lenses, roles and loops, Tools changed everything)
  8. 8. From training only, to tools (spectrum; Lenses, roles and loops, Tools changed everything)
  9. 9. It remembers nothing (scene; Lenses, roles and loops, It remembers nothing)
  10. 10. Long chats are compressed (evidence; Lenses, roles and loops, Long chats are compressed)
  11. 11. The newsroom's answer (evidence; Lenses, roles and loops, Long chats are compressed)
  12. 12. Many focused threads, each with a name (graph; Lenses, roles and loops, Many focused threads)
  13. 13. Where the memory is (evidence; Lenses, roles and loops, Long chats are compressed)
  14. 14. Not magic: a lens, a role, a loop. (punchline; Lenses, roles and loops, Why this matters)

The data is lenses-roles-and-loops.json and cast.json; the panels are drawn in your browser from it, by assets/storyboard.js with Rough.js. Nothing is an image file: change the JSON, rebuild, and every panel is redrawn.