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Show HN: I used Claude Code to discover connections between 100 books

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Re: Show HN: I used Claude Code to discover connections between 100 books

#31

Post by pmaze »

amadeuswoo wrote: post #22

The feedback loop you describe—watching Claude's logs, then just asking it what functionality it wished it had—feels like an underexplored pattern. Did you find its suggestions converged toward a stable toolset, or did it keep wanting new capabilities as the trails got more sophisticated?

I ended up judging where to draw the line. Its initial suggestions were genuinely useful and focused on making the basic tool use more efficient. e.g. complaining about a missing CLI parameter that I'd neglected to add for a specific command, requesting to let it navigate the topic tree in ways I hadn't considered, or new definitions for related topics. After a couple iterations the low hanging fruit was exhausted, and its suggestions started spiralling out beyond what I thought would pay off (like training custom embeddings). As long as I kept asking it for new ideas, it would come up with something, but with rapidly diminishing returns.

Re: Show HN: I used Claude Code to discover connections between 100 books

#32

Post by samuelknight »

amadeuswoo wrote: post #22

The feedback loop you describe—watching Claude's logs, then just asking it what functionality it wished it had—feels like an underexplored pattern. Did you find its suggestions converged toward a stable toolset, or did it keep wanting new capabilities as the trails got more sophisticated?

I do this all the time in my Claude code workflow: - Claude will stumble a few times before figuring out how to do part of a complex task - I will ask it to explain what it was trying to do, how it eventually solved it, and what was missing from its environment. - Trivial pointers go into the CLAUDE.md. Complex tasks go into a new project skill or a helper script

This is the best way to re-enforce a copilot because models are pretty smart most of the time and I can correct the cases where it stumbles with minimal cognitive effort. Over time I find more and more tasks are solved by agent intelligence or these happy path hints. As primitive as it is, CLAUDE.md is the best we have for long-term adaptive memory.

Re: Show HN: I used Claude Code to discover connections between 100 books

#33

Post by durch »

afro88 wrote: post #29
durch wrote: post #15

[flagged]

LLMs are generators, and that was the correct way to view them at the start. Agents explore.

Generator vs. explorer is a useful distinction, but it's incomplete. Agents without a recognition loop are just generators with extra steps.

What makes exploration valuable is the cycle: act, observe, recognize whether you're closer to what you wanted, then refine. Without that recognition ("closer" or "drifting"), you're exploring blind.

Context is what lets the loop close. You need enough of it to judge the outcome. I think that real shift isn't generators → agents. It's one-shot output → iterative refinement with judgment in the loop.

Re: Show HN: I used Claude Code to discover connections between 100 books

#34

Post by rjh29 »

timoth3y wrote: post #25

What meaningful connections did it uncover? You have an interesting idea here, but looking over the LLM output, it's not clear what these "connections" actually mean, or if they mean anything at all. Feeding a dataset into an LLM and getting it to output something is rather trivial. How is this particular output insightful or helpful? What specific connections gave you, the author, new insight into these works? You c…

100 books is too small a datasize - particularly given it's a set of HN recommendations (i.e. a very narrow and specific subset of books). A larger set would probably draw more surprising and interesting groupings.

Re: Show HN: I used Claude Code to discover connections between 100 books

#36

Post by bonkusbingus »

"There are, you see, two ways of reading a book: you either see it as a box with something inside and start looking for what it signifies, and then if you're even more perverse or depraved you set off after signifiers. And you treat the next book like a box contained in the first or containing it. And you annotate and interpret and question, and write a book about the book, and so on and on. Or there's the other way: you see the book as a little non-signifying machine, and the only question is "Does it work, and how does it work?" How does it work for you? If it doesn't work, if nothing comes through, you try another book. This second way of reading's intensive: something comes through or it doesn't. There's nothing to explain, nothing to understand, nothing to interpret." — Gilles Deleuze

Re: Show HN: I used Claude Code to discover connections between 100 books

#37

Post by tolerance »

I don’t like this product as a service to readers (i.e., people who read as a cognitive/philosophical exploit) but I do think that somewhere embedded in its backend there are things of benefit.

I think that this sucks the discreet joy out of reading and learning. Having the ways that the topics within a certain book can cross over in lead into another book of a different topic externalized is hollowing and I don’t find it useful.

On the other hand I feel like seeing this process externalized gives us a glimpse at how “the algorithms” (read: recommender systems) suggest seemingly disjunctive content to users. So as a technical achievement I can’t knock what you’ve done and I’m satisfied to see that you’re the guy behind the HN Book map that I thought was nice too.

At its core this looks like a representation of the advantages that LLMs can afford to the humanities. Most of us know how Rob Pike feels about them. I wonder if his senior former colleague feels the same: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/hum307/index.html. That’s a digression, but I’d like to see some people think in public about how to reasonably use these tools in that domain.

Re: Show HN: I used Claude Code to discover connections between 100 books

#38

Post by Closi »

8organicbits wrote: post #28

Can someone break this down for me? I'm seeing "Thanos committing fraud" in a section about "useful lies". Given that the founder is currently in prison, it seems odd to consider the lie useful instead of harmful. It kinda seems like the AI found a bunch of loosely related things and mislabeled the group. If you've read these books I'm not seeing what value this adds.

I guess the lies were useful until she got caught?

Re: Show HN: I used Claude Code to discover connections between 100 books

#39

Post by ako »

plutokras wrote: post #16
pxc wrote: post #13

I read a book maybe a decade ago on the "digital humanities". I wish now I could remember the title and author. :( Anyway, it introduced me to the idea of using computational methods in the humanities, including literature. I found it really interesting at the time! One of the the terms it introduced me to is "distant reading", whose name mirrors that of a technique you may have studied in your gen eds if you went to…

> I wish now I could remember the title and author. LLMs are great at finding media by vague descriptions. ;)

According to Claude (easy guess from the wikipedia link?):

The book is almost certainly by *Franco Moretti*, who coined the term "distant reading." Given the timeframe ("maybe a decade ago") and the description, it's most likely one of these two:

1. *"Distant Reading"* (2013) — A collection of Moretti's essays that directly takes the concept as its title. This would fit well with "about a decade ago."

2. *"Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History"* (2005) — His earlier and very influential work that laid out the quantitative, computational approach to literary analysis, even if it didn't use "distant reading" as prominently in the title.

Moretti, who founded the Stanford Literary Lab, was the major proponent of the idea that we should analyze literature not just through careful reading of individual canonical texts, but through large-scale computational analysis of hundreds or thousands of works—looking at trends in genre evolution, plot structures, title lengths, and other patterns that only emerge at scale.

Given that the commenter specifically remembers learning the term "distant reading" from the book, my best guess is *"Distant Reading" (2013)*, though "Graphs, Maps, Trees" is also a strong possibility if their memory of "a decade" is approximate.

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