Do you have any evaluations/ comparisons between small open source LLM and frontier LLM in the Lathe?
Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it
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Re: Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it
#72I think there's going to be the exact and precise range of people there has always been: some people are curious, and want/need to understand what they're doing, some people are not and just want to do. That want/need is a fundamental personality trait what makes an expert. LLM are a dream come true for these curious types. They'll only be accelerated by them. I don't think there's any real "loss" out there, just a b…
The issue is that there are now different expectations surrounding velocity and apparent productivity. Previously an individual new to web development might have genuinely needed to develop an understanding of web protocols, HTML and other stuff in that domain in addition to actually wanting to wrap their head around it. Nowadays spending the time required to understand how a website works carries a heavy opportunity…
An organisation which lets a person release a website without understanding how the web works is just asking for trouble. This was true before Transformer LLMs and is true after them.
LLMs probably just let those organisations make a larger and more load-bearing website faster, so that poor decisions speed the time to catastrophe.
Re: Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it
#73I think there's going to be the exact and precise range of people there has always been: some people are curious, and want/need to understand what they're doing, some people are not and just want to do. That want/need is a fundamental personality trait what makes an expert. LLM are a dream come true for these curious types. They'll only be accelerated by them. I don't think there's any real "loss" out there, just a b…
The issue is that there are now different expectations surrounding velocity and apparent productivity. Previously an individual new to web development might have genuinely needed to develop an understanding of web protocols, HTML and other stuff in that domain in addition to actually wanting to wrap their head around it. Nowadays spending the time required to understand how a website works carries a heavy opportunity…
> Previously an individual new to web development might have genuinely needed to develop an understanding of web protocols, HTML, and other stuff in that domain
That hasn't really been my experience, at least not for a long time (decades+). At least since jQuery's been around. There's always been a large group of people whose approach to software development was basically "run these commands, don't worry about why they work".
The tendency to treat tools as black boxes over time isn't new, I don't think.
A silver lining here is that in my experience the non-curious tended to stagnate over time and the curious tended to succeed, but obviously there's more to it than just that.
Re: Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it
#74[flagged]
Re: Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it
#75Can I use this to learn about a complex private repo or how it does things?
Re: Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you deal with context length degradation here? The harder questions will only arrive when the context is getting full.
If you have it question you for 1M tokens (aka the full length of the Wheel of Time series), I think your own context might get full before the LLMs.
The Wheel of Time is 4.3M words: https://www.reddit.com/r/WoT/comments/zs1ust/chart_of_wot_wo.... Some of its individual books are near 400k.
Re: Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it
#77A related idea is to have the LLM quiz you, Socratic-style about a topic of interest. It persists in asking questions at deeper levels until you arrive at the answer yourself. This forces you to think hard about a problem, and this effort helps with understanding, learning and retention. Of course I made a Socratic-quiz skill for this, to use with any coding agent or similar: https://pchalasani.github.io/claude-code-…
How do you deal with context length degradation here? The harder questions will only arrive when the context is getting full.
If it's a well-known concept (like pretty much anything you can find from undergraduate textbook), the LLM doesn't need the whole context to teach you.
If it's something actually novel, no matter how much context you provide it'll still hallucinate.
Re: Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it
#78[flagged]
Re: Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it
#79[flagged]
Re: Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it
#80Nice! I do this now locally with LLMS and ollama and my own havky prompts. I could not find if this also supports ollama?
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