Lesson 1: Ask the model to show its working
21 min read·13 Oct 2026
Module 5 · Lesson 1 · About 50 minutes · Needs: Module 4 Lesson 2 (the harness and a strict parser) and the guard ask from course-guide/02; Module 3 helps (what reasoning tokens are)The situation
It is Monday 29 June 2026, week 5. Maya wants the assistant to say whether a refund is due. Yuki Sato writes in T-1004: "I bought the annual Team plan 20 days ago... Can I get my money back?" A quick reader sees "annual" and says yes. The policy says no: the window is 14 days.
This lesson asks the model to reason before it answers, four ways, and measures what each buys. T-1004 is the running example.