_moog

That's going to be super useful for some of the high-level prompt-testing work I'm doing. Thanks!

I'm also getting more into the lower-level LLM fine-tuning, training on custom chat templates, etc. which is more of where the diagram was needed.

I recently started diving into LLMs a few weeks ago, and one thing that immediately caught me off guard was how little standardization there is across all the various pieces you would use to build a chat stack.

Want to swap out your client for a different one? Good luck - it probably expects a completely different schema. Trying a new model? Hope you're ready to deal with a different chat template. It felt like every layer had its own way of doing things, which made understanding the flow pretty frustrating for a noobie.

So I sketched out a diagram that maps out what (rough) schema is being used at each step of the process - from the initial request all the way through Ollama and an MCP server with OpenAI-compatible endpoints showing what transformations occur where.

Figured I'd share it as it may help someone else.

https://moog.sh/posts/openai_ollama_mcp_flow.html

Somewhat ironically, Claude built the JS hooks for my SVG with about five minutes of prompting.

> Newer tools/companies have a different approach that makes cost far more predictable and generally lower.

What newer tools/companies are in this category? Any that you recommend?

It wrote a sad song for me in A7m that was actually quite good.

So far I've been blown away by its ability to not only understand what I'm asking, but provide decent answers and clarify something or update its answer when it's wrong.

I asked it to draw me an ASCII art banana.

It did not go well: https://imgur.com/a/5g2e9Ld

I found myself in a similar boat (I'm a software engineer with no college degree).

I did well in school with geometry, algebra, and pre-calculus but I did so by memorizing not by understanding.

A decade later I ended up going through a lot of Khan Academy videos to refresh myself and then diving into discrete math and linear algebra textbooks. It really helped me to finally understand the core mathematical concepts that we use in programming algorithms.

> In fact, in numerous studies conducted throughout the world, consuming four or five eight-ounce cups of coffee (or about 400 milligrams of caffeine) a day has been associated with reduced death rates.

That seems like an absurd amount of coffee to drink in one day, no?