Reading across books with Claude Code

Discussed earlier this week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46567400

I did a similar thing with productivity books early last year, but never released it because it wasn't high enough quality. I keep meaning to get back to that project but it had a much more rigid hypothesis in mind - trying to get the kind of classification from this is pretty difficult and even more so to get high value from it.

This is all interesting, however I find myself most interested in how the topic tree is created. It seems super useful for lots of things. Anyone can point me to something similar with details?

EDIT: Whoops, I found more details at the very end of the article.

This sounds like a huge waste of time.

People should be reading books with their eyes, not LLM scam tech.

I really like the idea of the topic tree. That intuitively resonates.

This was posted before and there were many good criticisms raised in the comments thread.

I'd just reiterate two general points of critique:

1. The point of establishing connections between texts is semantic and terms can have vastly different semantic meanings dependent on the sphere of discourse in which they occur. Because of the way LLMs work, the really novel connections probably won't be found by an LLM since the way they function is quite literally to uncover what isn't novel.

2. Part of the point in making these connections is the process that acts on the human being making the connections. Handing it all off to an LLM is no better than blindly trusting authority figures. If you want to use LLMs as generators of possible starting points or things to look at and verify and research yourself, that seems totally fine.

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In several years, IMO the most interesting people are going to be the ones still actually reading paper books and not trying to shove everything into a LLM