Probing, Not Tutoring: Design of a Conversational AI Agent for Introductory Mechanics and a Definition of "Cave Detection"
Large language model (LLM) agents built for teaching tend to leak evaluation: they praise right answers, hint after wrong ones, and drift toward explaining. This note records the design of Talk It Through: Newton's Laws, a prompt-engineered agent for introductory mechanics that probes understanding instead of tutoring....