Module 1 · Foundations — what Llama is Lesson 3 of 15
The screen: where every control lives
A tour of the interface you will live in — two very different surfaces: a normal chat assistant, and a command line where you load a file of weights and talk to it. Every panel has a reason to exist, and half of them are the difference between a chat and a system.
The concept
The interface of Llama is two very different surfaces: a normal chat assistant, and a command line where you load a file of weights and talk to it. That sentence is worth slowing down on, because the single biggest cause of bad output is not a bad prompt — it is a good prompt typed into the wrong place.
The history list is your memory of what worked. Name your conversations. The temporary or private mode is for anything you would not want in an account's history. The settings panel holds the personal instructions that apply to everything, which is where your context belongs rather than repeated at the top of every message.
Do this once, properly: run one prompt against two different model sizes on your own machine and time both, so you can feel the trade you are making. It takes fifteen minutes and saves you those fifteen minutes every week after.
Worked example
The chat assistant is a normal assistant. The interesting surface is the terminal, where you choose the model size and see what it costs you in memory.
Your practice task
Spend fifteen minutes doing nothing but clicking. Open every panel, rename one conversation, and save one setting you will want again. Fluency with the screen is what stops you re-explaining yourself every session.
Do this before moving on. Reading a solution teaches the shape of it; typing it teaches you.
Key takeaway
The interface of Llama is two very different surfaces: a normal chat assistant, and a command line where you load a file of weights and talk to it.
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