LLM request anatomy · public-safe edition
What the model actually receives
A simple question enters the IDE. The agent harness wraps it in operating instructions, capability catalogs, memories, and tool contracts before the model sees it. Sensitive captured values are omitted or masked.
Area preserves the original serialized character count. Inspector values are public-safe: persistent memory and registries are omitted, and personal, machine, network, and session identifiers are masked.
Prompt regionPUBLIC-SAFE
The harness is part of the prompt
The model does not receive the sentence in isolation. Its apparent identity and behavior are shaped by the surrounding system instructions, injected context, available skills, and callable tools.
The 12 visible characters in “who are you?” are almost invisible at the scale of the complete request.