LLMs and the Transformer Architecture, End to End
Co-authored by Claude Opus 4.8
This blog is summarized via my personal notes on the Transformer architecture, which is the backbone of Large Language Models (LLMs) like Claude and GPT. It provides a detailed walkthrough of the entire process, from tokenization to generating a probability distribution over the vocabulary, highlighting key components such as Q/K/V computation, attention mechanisms, and the differences between encoder-decoder and decoder-only models.

Everything here is general, public knowledge (see the Elastic overview linked at the end). There is no private or proprietary code involved. Because the original notes leaned heavily on diagrams, every figure below is redrawn as an ASCII flow so the post stays self-contained.




