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Signed-off-by: Danila Fedorin <danila.fedorin@gmail.com>
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Danila Fedorin
2026-04-05 16:00:31 -07:00
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@@ -3,6 +3,7 @@ title: "Generating Flashcards from PDF Underlines"
date: 2026-04-04T12:25:14-07:00
tags: ["LLMs", "Python"]
draft: true
series: ["LLM-Assisted Flashcard Generator"]
---
__TL;DR__: I, with the help of ChatGPT, wrote a program that helps me
@@ -234,184 +235,5 @@ That said, I think that those features are way beyond the 80:20 transition:
it would be much harder for me to get to that point, and the benefit would
be relatively small. Today, I'm happy to stick with what I already have.
### Personal Software with the Help of LLMs
Like I mentioned earlier, this was one of my earliest experiences with
LLM-driven development, and I think it shaped my outlook on the technology
quite a bit. For me, the bottom line is this: _with LLMs, I was able to
rapidly solve a problem that was holding me back in another area of my life_.
My goal was never to "produce software", but to "acquire vocabulary",
and, viewed from this perspective, I think the experience has been a
colossal success.
As someone who works on software, I am always reminded that end-users rarely
care about the technology as much as us technologists; they care about
having their problems solved. I find taking that perspective to be challenging
(though valuable) because software is my craft, and because in thinking
about the solution, I have to think about the elements that bring it to life.
With LLMs, I was able --- allowed? --- to view things more so from the
end-user perspective. I didn't know, and didn't need to know, the API
for `PyMuPDF`, `argostranslate`, or `spaCy`. I didn't need to understand
the PDF format. I could move one step away from the nitty-gritty and focus
on the 'why' and the 'what', on the challenge of what I wanted to accomplish.
I wrestled with the inherent complexity and
avoided altogether the unrelated difficulties that merely happened to be
there (downloading language modules; learning translation APIs; etc.)
By enabling me to do this, the LLM let me make rapid progress, and to produce
solutions to problems I would've previously deemed "too hard" or "too tedious".
This did, however, markedly reduce the care with which I was examining
the output. I don't think I've _ever_ read the code that produces the
pretty colored boxes in my program's debug output. This shift, I think,
has been a divisive element of AI discourse in technical communities.
I think that this has to do, at least in part, with different views
on code as a medium.
#### The Builders and the Craftsmen
There are two perspectives through which one may view software:
as a craft in and of itself, and as a means to some end.
My flashcard extractor can be viewed in vastly different ways when faced
from these two perspective. In terms of craft, I think that it is at best
mediocre; most of the code is generated, slightly verbose and somewhat
tedious. The codebase is far from inspiring, and if I had written it by hand,
I would not be particularly proud of it. In terms of product, though,
I think it tells an exciting story: here I am, reading Camus again, because
I was able to improve the workflow around said reading. In a day, I was able
to achieve what I couldn't muster in a year or two on my own.
The truth is, the "builder vs. craftsman" distinction is a simplifying one,
another in the long line of "us vs. them" classifications. Any one person is
capable of being any combination of these two camps at any given time. Indeed,
different sorts of software demand to be viewed through different lenses.
I will _still_ treat work on my long-term projects as craft, because
I will come back to it again and again, and because our craft has evolved
to engender stability and maintainability.
However, I am more than happy to settle for 'underwhelming' when it means an
individual need of mine can be addressed in record time. I think this
gives rise to a new sort of software: highly individual, explicitly
non-robust, and treated differently from software crafted with
deliberate thought and foresight.
#### Personal Software
I think as time goes on, I am becoming more and more convinced by the idea
of "personal software". One might argue that much of the complexity in many
pieces of software is driven by the need of that software to accommodate
the diverse needs of many users. Still, software remains somewhat inflexible and
unable to accommodate individual needs. Features or uses that demand
changes at the software level move at a slower pace: finite developer time
needs to be spent analyzing what users need, determining the costs of this new
functionality, choosing which of the many possible requests to fulfill.
On the other hand, software that enables the users to build their customizations
for themselves, by exposing numerous configuration options and abstractions,
becomes, over time, very complicated to grasp.
Now, suppose that the complexity of such software scales superlinearly with
the number of features it provides. Suppose also that individual users
leverage only a small subset of the software's functionality. From these
assumptions it would follow that individual programs, made to serve a single
user's need, would be significantly less complicated than the "whole".
By definition, these programs would also be better tailored to the users'
needs. With LLMs, we're getting to a future where this might be possible.
I think that my flashcard generator is an early instance of such software.
It doesn't worry about various book formats, or various languages, or
various page layouts. The heuristic was tweaked to fit my use case, and
now works 100% of the time. I understand the software in its entirety.
I thought about sharing it --- and, in way, I did, since it's
[open source](https://dev.danilafe.com/DanilaFe/vocab-builder) --- but realized
that outside of the constraints of my own problem, it likely will not be
of that much use. I _could_ experiment with more varied constraints, but
that would turn in back into the sort of software I discussed above:
general, robust, and complex.
Today, I think that there is a whole class of software that is amenable to
being "personal". My flashcard generator is one such piece of software;
I imagine file-organization (as served by many "bulk rename and move" pieces
of software out there), video wrangling (possible today with `ffmpeg`'s
myriad of flags and switches), and data visualization to be other
instances of problems in that class. I am merely intuiting here, but
if I had to give a rough heuristic, it would be problems that:
* __fulfill a short-frequency need__, because availability, deployment,
etc. significantly raises the bar for quality.
* e.g., I collect flashcards once every two weeks;
I organize my filesystem once a month; I don't spend nearly enough money
to want to re-generate cash flow charts very often
* __have an "answer" that's relatively easy to assess__, because
LLMs are not perfect and iteration must be possible and easy.
* e.g., I can see that all the underlined words are listed in my web app;
I know that my files are in the right folders, named appropriately,
by inspection; my charts seem to track with reality
* __have a relatively complex technical implementation__, because
why would you bother invoking an LLM if you can "just" click a button somewhere?
* e.g., extracting data from PDFs requires some wrangling;
bulk-renaming files requires some tedious and possibly case-specific
pattern matching; cash flow between N accounts requires some graph
analysis
* __have relatively low stakes__, again, because LLMs are not perfect,
and nor is (necessarily) one's understanding of the problem.
* e.g., it's OK if I miss some words I underlined; my cash flow
charts only give me an impression of my spending;
* I recognize that moving files is a potentially destructive operation.
I dream of a world in which, to make use of my hardware, I just _ask_,
and don't worry much about languages, frameworks, or sharing my solution
with others --- that last one because they can just ask as well.
#### The Unfair Advantage of Being Technical
I recognize that my success described here did not come for free. There
were numerous parts of the process where my software background helped
get the most out of Codex.
For one thing, writing software trains us to think precisely about problems.
We learn to state exactly what we want, to decompose tasks into steps,
and to intuit the exact size of these steps; to know what's hard and what's
easy for the machine. When working with an LLM, these skills make it possible
to hit the ground running, to know what to ask and to help pluck out a particular
solution from the space of various approaches. I think that this greatly
accelerates the effectiveness of using LLMs compared to non-technical experts.
For another, the boundary between 'manual' and 'automatic' is not always consistent.
Though I didn't touch any of the `PyMuPDF` code, I did need to look fairly
closely at the logic that classified my squiggles as "underlines" and found
associated words. It was not enough to treat LLM-generated code as a black box.
Another advantage software folks have when leveraging LLMs is the established
rigor of software development. LLMs can and do make mistakes, but so do people.
Our field has been built around reducing these mistakes' impact and frequency.
Knowing to use version control helps turn the pathological downward spiral
of accumulating incorrect tweaks into monotonic, step-wise improvements.
Knowing how to construct a test suite and thinking about edge cases can
provide an agent LLM the grounding it needs to iterate rapidly and safely.
In this way, I think the dream of personal software is far from being realized
for the general public. Without the foundation of experience and rigor,
LLM-driven development can easily devolve into a frustrating and endless
back-and-forth, or worse, successfully build software that is subtly and
convincingly wrong.
#### The Shoulders of Giants
The only reason all of this was possible is that the authors of `PyMuPDF`,
`genanki`, `spaCy`, and `argos-translate` made them available for me to use from
my code. These libraries provided the bulk of the functionality that Codex and I
were able to glue into a final product. It would be a mistake to forget this,
and to confuse the sustained, thoughtful efforts of the people behind these
projects for the one-off, hyper-specific software I've been talking about.
We need these packages, and others like them, to provide a foundation for the
things we build. They bring stability, reuse, and the sort of cohesion that
is not possible through an amalgamation of home-grown personal scripts.
In my view, something like `spaCy` is to my flashcard script as a brick is to
grout. There is a fundamental difference.
I don't know how LLMs will integrate into the future of large-scale software
development. The discipline becomes something else entirely when the
constraints of "personal software" I floated above cease to apply. Though
LLMs can still enable doing what was previously too difficult, tedious,
or time consuming (like my little 'underline visualizer'), it remains
to be seen how to integrate this new ease into the software lifecycle
without threatening its future.
In the [next part of this series]({{< relref "llm_personal_software" >}}),
I will talk more about how this project influenced my views on LLMs.