Wow I'm doing it way wrong. How do I get the good stuff?

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.

"users have reported some truly wild things" "the results were shocking" "the most amazing thing I have seen an LLM do" "exciting and frightening all at once" "the most astounding result I have ever seen" "made the hair stand up on the back of my neck"

Some time ago, I'd been working on a framework that involved a series of servers (not the only one I've talked to claude about) that had to pass messages around in a particular fashion. Mostly technical implementation details and occasional questions about architecture.

Fast forward a ways, and on a lark I decided to ask in the abstract about the best way to structure such an interaction. Mark that this was not in the same chat or project and didn't have any identifying information about the original, save for the structure of the abstraction (in this case, a message bus server and some translation and processing services, all accessed via client.)

so:

- we were far enough removed that the whole conversation pertaining to the original was for sure not in the context window

- we only referred to the abstraction (with like a A=>B=>C=>B=>A kind of notation and a very brief question)

- most of the work on the original was in claude code

and it knew. In the answer it gave, it mentioned the project by name. I can think of only two ways this could have happened:

- they are doing some real fancy tricks to cram your entire corpus of chat history into the current context somehow

- the model has access to some kind of fact database where it was keeping an effective enough abstraction to make the connection

I find either one mindblowing for different reasons.