That's what you said earlier you were talking about, and that's what I replied to. Now you're saying that you're in fact not talking about "the mental model of understanding what works with LLMs and doesn't" at all. Seems you have to improve your communication skills mate ;]

What I'm saying is that using LLMs while imagining them to be kinda like search engines is just a way to get burned by hallucinations and disappointed with poor results. They don't work even remotely similar to search engines, neither internally nor for an external observer. For some kinds of input they may trick you into believing they actually do, but that impression will fall apart pretty quickly once you try to actually exercise it. That's how you get people who are genuinely shocked that ChatGPT gave them references to papers that were completely made up, for example - which is something that shouldn't surprise anyone using this tech at all, as that's just how it works.