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Show HN: DocAsker – Use LLMs to ask documentation questions

docasker.com

11–20 of 27 posts

Re: Show HN: DocAsker – Use LLMs to ask documentation questions

#11
post #3

Hi HN! I'm the other person working on this with Ankly. This came up as a pet project as we were eager to put some LLM work into production. Currently piggy-backing off APIs, though the results with certain self-hosted models could be worse (but could be better), as he mentioned, we've ran some experiments with Flan-T5. We have a bunch of current plans as to where to keep building on this, beyond improving the model/…

How do you decide where to break up the chunks for embedding? On mine I am currently just doing something like X words per chunk. It's seems like ideally I could parse out all source code and avoiding breaking up functions but not sure how to do that for arbitrary languages.

Re: Show HN: DocAsker – Use LLMs to ask documentation questions

#12
post #6

This makes me think of confluence search. Maybe you can ingest confluence docs and make this a way for admins and users to interact with corporate docs.

We're working on a similar thing using the Notion API, so far synthetic tests are really encouraging, but we haven't quite tested it on a massive/sprawling corporate doc. Very excited about the prospect though!

Re: Show HN: DocAsker – Use LLMs to ask documentation questions

#13

Former attorney here. I dreamt about having access to a tool like this for complex contracts and would’ve paid through the nose for it. I suspect I’m not the only one. Exciting times.

This is something I've thought about a lot, as I worked in legaltech for a few years. The main issue here however would be the (lack of) networking and breaking into the legal market, it takes a lot to get the ball rolling even if the tech is good, and more established actors are likely to do it first I feel.

Re: Show HN: DocAsker – Use LLMs to ask documentation questions

#14
post #4

when i ask a question it flashes "we are currently thinking of an answer for you" then abruptly cancels and goes back to the beginning state with no answer given. some error going on in the backend? cant see anything in the console

Sorry about that, I'll dig into the logs -- we had a lot more traffic than we expected overnight so it could be that the backend didn't scale quickly enough and ended up timing out some requests.

Re: Show HN: DocAsker – Use LLMs to ask documentation questions

#16
post #10
post #3

Hi HN! I'm the other person working on this with Ankly. This came up as a pet project as we were eager to put some LLM work into production. Currently piggy-backing off APIs, though the results with certain self-hosted models could be worse (but could be better), as he mentioned, we've ran some experiments with Flan-T5. We have a bunch of current plans as to where to keep building on this, beyond improving the model/…

I've noticed when prompting ChatGPT for code that it occasionally invents libraries that don't exist at all, or adds it own input if something about a prompt is strongly connected to its latent knowledge. For example, I asked it to write a program that would select one of my favourite dinner ideas at random, providing a list of options in my prompt. It added 4 more recipes I'd never heard of and some playful commenta…

It's kind of like that. You always have the option of fine-tuning, although that quickly gets pricey if you aren't self hosting (e.g. OpenAI bills an order of magnitude higher for serving fine-tuned models)

The constraints can be put in place through a bunch of different things. The prompt engineering is a big thing, instruction-tuned models can be pretty good at following very restrictive instructions. You do end up sacrificing some creativity in your answers by adding a lot of restrictions but it generally works quite well as a safeguard layer. A lot of the cool LLM applications are, first and foremost, proper prompting. Setting a low temperature is also key, as the higher likelihood suggestions _generally_ (but not always) are less made-up. ChatGPT makes this a bit harder as you have no control over the model parameters (temperature is OpenAI-set) and cannot control the original prompt, meaning you can't fully be in charge of the instructions it gets, so any mitigation to avoid hallucinations will have its limits.

After that yeah, the context documents you provide are pretty important in grounding it. It ties back in with the prompt, but you can more or less drill it into a low-temperature instruction-fine tuned model that if it can't find the answer within a set of documents you provide it, it should simply not answer. Again, you lose out in some contexts (it's a bad feeling on the user's end to not get an answer) but you also ensure that your model isn't live-freewheeling about a new framework called Reagular...

Re: Show HN: DocAsker – Use LLMs to ask documentation questions

#17
post #11
post #3

Hi HN! I'm the other person working on this with Ankly. This came up as a pet project as we were eager to put some LLM work into production. Currently piggy-backing off APIs, though the results with certain self-hosted models could be worse (but could be better), as he mentioned, we've ran some experiments with Flan-T5. We have a bunch of current plans as to where to keep building on this, beyond improving the model/…

How do you decide where to break up the chunks for embedding? On mine I am currently just doing something like X words per chunk. It's seems like ideally I could parse out all source code and avoiding breaking up functions but not sure how to do that for arbitrary languages.

I've experimented with a few approaches and to be honest, kind of gone with what "felt best" as we're quite artisanal with our testing approach at the moment.

We try to always go for logical breakpoints (e.g. never in the middle of a sentence or explanation). Some docs are cut into smaller chunks because the way they're written works quite well for segmentation, and smaller chunks have the advantage of allowing more to be looked-up, so your semantic search is allowed to mess up as long as it finds 1-2 relevant context elements. For some, we felt like cutting into chunk was losing too much information, so we've added them as quite huge chunks. It feels suboptimal in some ways, especially in terms of performance and modularity, but we've also found that the model is very good at parsing a ±2k token length sample and getting the right info from it in most cases.

Ultimately there's no right answer and it's a case-by-case tradeoff.

Re: Show HN: DocAsker – Use LLMs to ask documentation questions

#19
post #7

Very nice, and congratulations! Is botco.ai a competitor to docask?

I'm not too familiar with botco.ai, but from what I can see, we're approaching fairly different problems. DocAsker once deployed on an internal documentation (for example) would allow you to query it, for things like "What was agreed upon on the meeting about X?" or "What's the deployment procedure for the forecast tool?".

We haven't thought about marketing use-cases like botco seems to be focused on, and we're probably a bit too tight resource-wise to target this usage as of right now.

Re: Show HN: DocAsker – Use LLMs to ask documentation questions

#20

This is a great idea. I've already toyed with copy-pasting pages of documentation into ChatGPT with varying degrees of success.

For sure, there are a lot of applications for this kind of platform. We're very happy with the initial feedback we've received, definitely validates our concept. Thanks for checking us out!
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