Comment by nestorD
1 day ago
Oh! That's a nice use-case and not too far from stuff I have been playing with! (happily I do not have to deal with handwriting, just bad scans of older newspapers and texts)
I can vouch for the fact that LLMs are great at searching in the original language, summarizing key points to let you know whether a document might be of interest, then providing you with a translation where you need one.
The fun part has been build tools to turn Claude code and Codex CLI into capable research assistant for that type of projects.
> The fun part has been build tools to turn Claude code and Codex CLI into capable research assistant for that type of projects.
What does that look like? How well does it work?
I ended up writing a research TUI with my own higher level orchestration (basically have the thing keep working in a loop until a budget has been reached) and document extraction.
I started with a UI that sounded like it was built along the same lines as yours, which had the advantage of letting me enforce a pipeline and exhaustivity of search (I don't want the 10 most promising documents, I want all of them).
But I realized I was not using it much because it was that big and inflexible (plus I keep wanting to stamp out all the bugs, which I do not have the time to do on a hobby project). So I ended up extracting it into MCPs (equipped to do full-text search and download OCR from the various databases I care about) and AGENTS.md files (defining pipelines, as well as patterns for both searching behavior and reporting of results). I also put together a sub-agent for translation (cutting away all tools besides reading and writing files, and giving it some document-specific contextual information).
That lets me use Claude Code and Codex CLI (which, anecdotally, I have found to be the better of the two for that kind of work; it seems to deal better with longer inputs produced by searches) as the driver, telling them what I am researching and maybe how I would structure the search, then letting them run in the background before checking their report and steering the search based on that.
It is not perfect (if a search surfaces 300 promising documents, it will not check all of them, and it often misunderstands things due to lacking further context), but I now find myself reaching for it regularly, and I polish out problems one at a time. The next goal is to add more data sources and to maybe unify things further.
> It is not perfect (if a search surfaces 300 promising documents, it will not check all of them, and it often misunderstands things due to lacking further context)
This has been the biggest problem for me too. I jokingly call it the LLM halting problem because it never knows the proper time to stop working on something, finishing way too fast without going through each item in the list. That’s why I’ve been doing my own custom orchestration, drip feeding it results with a mix of summarization and content extraction to keep the context from different documents chained together.
Especially working with unindexed content like colonial documents where I’m searching through thousands of pages spread (as JPEGs) over hundreds of documents for a single one that’s relevant to my research, but there are latent mentions of a name that ties them all together (like a minor member of an expedition giving relevant testimony in an unrelated case). It turns into a messy web of named entity recognition and a bunch of more classical NLU tasks, except done with an LLM because I’m lazy.