31–40 of 94 posts
We have notebooklm at home? Is there any comparison between these two, looks nice
Thanks for sharing NotebookLM, I hadn't seen that! I'll take a look and add a comparison to the README if it's compelling.
There is of course a degree of true usefulness to this. However I’ve been a technical educator for years and I’ve tried to do lots with LLMs. Even now, LLMs are terrible educators. They do not make coherent progressive curriculums. They hallucinate details which the student will not have the knowledge to challenge. If you use an LLM to make a tutorial you will get some benefit for sure, especially if you use it for S…
A few thoughts based on my limited experience building and using lathe:
- Part of the lathe skills are to first find source materials to base curriculum on. It's not foolproof by any means, nor is it a novel approach, but it's helped ground the content in reality more than an open ended prompt usually does (in my experience)
- We're scoped to tutorials, over full blown curriculum. I found having lathe write one part of a tutorial series at a time, over the whole thing at once, usually gave me better results (and is why `/lathe-extend` is a thing)
- To your point about not having the instinct to realize when it's giving me a poor progression or untrue content, my experience is that by actually writing the program the tutorial walks me through, I get definitive proof of if the results are true or not. One of the most impactful (and all too frequent) answers I got as a young programmer was "write a program and find out" and it's still good advice today. Not at all proposing this makes lathe tutorials infallible, but in the context and scope of the project it seems to take the bite out of the worst failure modes here. That said, maybe that implies lathe is most useful and least dangerous in the hands of an experience developer looking to learn a new domain, over someone looking to build foundational technical (and technical learning) skills? I'll think that over!
I'm really curious what your experience would lead you to think about the above though? Are there critical failure modes for LLMs writing hands on technical education I just haven't tripped over yet?
A 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.
There is of course a degree of true usefulness to this. However I’ve been a technical educator for years and I’ve tried to do lots with LLMs. Even now, LLMs are terrible educators. They do not make coherent progressive curriculums. They hallucinate details which the student will not have the knowledge to challenge. If you use an LLM to make a tutorial you will get some benefit for sure, especially if you use it for S…
Still, it took a lot more effort than just delivering the initial request. AI makes everyone produce something average but you still need taste to produce something good - I guess this applies to courses too.
I have updated the popular /grill-me skill for this exact purpose! I had a very insightful grilling session yesterday on what exactly happens when you try to load an extremely large dataset in pandas, covering everything down to the last detail !