Practical AI for Beginners: Tools, Models, Workflows, and Limitations
Practical AI for beginners starts with a bounded, reviewable task rather than a tool shopping list. This guide explains the beginner stack, how to choose tools and…
FROM THE AUTHOR
John C. Mullen
Explore the published guides and contributions from John C. Mullen.
46 published articlesWhy a RAG System Retrieves the Wrong Documents
When a RAG system returns the wrong document, the language model is rarely the cause. The failure usually sits in chunking, retrieval, or ranking. This guide explains…
Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Practical Guide to RAG Systems
Retrieval-Augmented Generation lets a language model answer from evidence in your own documents instead of relying only on its training data. This guide explains the four stages…
Common AI API Errors: Authentication, Rate Limits, and Timeouts
AI API failures usually fall into authentication, rate limit or quota, and timeout classes. Reading the HTTP status and provider error code first prevents wasted retries and…
Local AI: A Complete Guide to Running Language Models on Your Computer
Local AI means running a language model on hardware you control instead of sending prompts to a hosted service. This guide explains how local inference works, how…
How to Add Human Review Before AI Content Is Published
Adding human review before publication means inserting an explicit approval state between generation and publishing, binding that approval to a specific version of the content, and letting…
How to Store AI API Credentials in a WordPress Integration
WordPress 7.0's Connectors API standardizes how AI provider keys are configured, but a custom integration still has to decide where the secret physically lives. This guide compares…
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…
Designing 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…