'Don't Let the LLM Speak, Just Probe It' — Hidden-State Probes for Faster, Safer Inference

j11y.io (Hacker News)·medium signal

A technical post argues for reading an LLM's hidden internal states directly rather than generating full text output, using probes to extract classifications or decisions cheaply and with less hallucination surface. For builders, it's a practical interpretability/efficiency pattern: when you only need a signal (intent, safety flag, route), probing activations can beat free-form generation.