Level 1 — Basic Responder: The Human Guides the Entire Flow

~10 min read

The least autonomous level: the LLM is a generic responder that receives an input and produces an output, with little to no control over the program's flow — the human designs and controls everything around it.

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Key points

  • Level 1 is the least autonomous level — the LLM is a generic responder with little to no control over program flow
  • A human designs and controls the entire flow: what gets called, when, and what happens to the output
  • The LLM's role is limited to receiving an input and producing an output for one isolated step
  • This is the right level for genuinely single-step, well-defined transformations — not a lesser way to use an LLM
  • The 5-level progression overall tracks how much control shifts from human-defined to LLM-defined flow — Level 1 is the human keeping nearly all of it