Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to How LLMs Work – Interactive visual guide based on Karpathy's lecture
All content is based on Andrej Karpathy's "Intro to Large Language Models" lecture (youtube.com/watch?v=7xTGNNLPyMI). I downloaded the transcript and used Claude Code to generate the entire interactive site from it — single HTML file. I find it useful to revisit this content time to time.
This is an interactive visual guide explaining how large language models work, based on Andrej Karpathy's "Intro to Large Language Models" lecture. The creator extracted the lecture transcript and used Claude Code to… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1VI
Hi HN, We've just published a lot of original, visual, and intuitive explanations of concepts to introduce people to large language models. It's available for free with no sign-up needed and it includes text articles, some video explanations, and code examples/notebooks as well. And we're available to answer your questions in a dedicated Discord channel. You can find it here: https://llm.university/ Having written https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-transformer/, I've been thinking about these topics and how best to communicate them for half a…
2023 · its alternatives →
- 2
I think LLMs are overused to summarise and underused to help us read deeper. I built a system for Claude Code to browse 100 non-fiction books and find interesting connections between them. I started out with a pipeline in stages, chaining together LLM calls to build up a context of the library. I was mainly getting back the insight that I was baking into the prompts, and the results weren't particularly surprising. On a whim, I gave CC access to my debug CLI tools and found that it wiped the floor with that approach. It gave actually interesting results and required very little orchestration…
Jan 2026 · trails.pieterma.es · its alternatives →
- 3
Built a ~9M param LLM from scratch to understand how they actually work. Vanilla transformer, 60K synthetic conversations, ~130 lines of PyTorch. Trains in 5 min on a free Colab T4. The fish thinks the meaning of life is food. Fork it and swap the personality for your own character.
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 4
A few days ago I found myself trying out GLM 5.2 and was really positively impressed. The capabilities and security I was getting from this LLM are similar to those I've gotten from models like Claude or GPT, and this really surprised me. But then I thought, "I wonder how it would work on a normal computer like mine," and above all, "I wonder if it would work without going into OOM on a computer like mine." So I started working with the help of agents to test this possibility. I started converting the model to int4, understanding MTP usage, and if possible implementing DSA for long context.…
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5
I shipped a wiki layer for AI agents that uses markdown + git as the source of truth, with a bleve (BM25) + SQLite index on top. No vector or graph db yet. It runs locally in ~/.wuphf/wiki/ and you can git clone it out if you want to take your knowledge with you. The shape is the one Karpathy has been circling for a while: an LLM-native knowledge substrate that agents both read from and write into, so context compounds across sessions rather than getting re-pasted every morning. Most implementations of that idea land on Postgres, pgvector, Neo4j, Kafka, and a dashboard. I…
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6
- 7
Unlock your knowledge with 2000 LLM prompts
2023 · miguelanticonam.gumroad.com · its alternatives →
- 8KG
Hi HN! My latest side project is knowledge graph that maps the French culinary network using data extracted from restaurant reviews from LeFooding.com. The project uses LLMs to extract structured information from unstructured text. Some technical aspects you may be interested in: - Used structured generation to reliably parse unstructured text into a consistent schema - Tested multiple models (Mistral-7B-v0.3, Llama3.2-3B, gpt4o-mini) for information extraction - Created an interactive visualization using gephi-lite and Retina (WebGL) - Built (with Claude) a simple Flask web app to clean and…
2025 · theophilecantelob.re · its alternatives →
- 9
Hey HN, I made Browser-Use, an open-source tool that lets (all Langchain supported) LLMs execute tasks directly in the browser just with function calling. It allows you to build agents that interact with web elements using natural language prompts. We created a layer that simplifies website interaction for LLMs by extracting xPaths and interactive elements like buttons and input fields (and other fancy things). This enables you to design custom web automation and scraping functions without manual inspection through DevTools. Hasn't this been done a lot of times? Good question, as a general…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 10
The from-scratch guide to building large language models in NodeJS.
7d ago · book.humanexperiences.io · its alternatives →
- 11BI
Hello HN, Recently an amazingly beautiful explainer was shared on HN: https://explainers.blog/posts/why-is-the-sky-blue/ I loved it so much that I wished more topics were explained that way. So, I decided to stress-test today's frontier models (Opus 4.6 in Claude Code) to generate similar explainer on any given topic WITH (almost) one shot and minimal nudging. I'm launching with four topics: Fourier transformation, scaling laws in bio, cellular automata and LLMs. I would let you be the judge, but I'm quite liking them. Some things I learned: - Prompting CC to test…
Feb 2026 · paraschopra.github.io · its alternatives →
- 12
This is a weekend hack that I'd like to further develop as it's working surprisingly well. Using MCTS, we can explore a space of possible verified programs with an LLM. We check the partial programs at each step, and so steer towards programs that pass the verifier. https://github.com/namin/llm-verified-with-monte-carlo-tree-...
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13IW
I grew up on the Infocom games and when microsoft actually open-sourced Zork 1/2/3 I really wanted to figure out how to use LLMs to let you type whatever you want, I always found the amount language that the games "understood" to be so limiting - even if it was pretty state of the art at the time. So I figured out how to wrap it with Tambo.. (and run the game engine in the browser) basically whatever you type gets "translated" into zork-speak and passed to the game - and then the LLM takes the game's output and optionally adds flavor. (the little ">_" button at the top exposes the…
Jan 2026 · infocom.tambo.co · its alternatives →
- 14
Some technical context on what we ran into building this. MCP tools don't really work for financial data at scale. One tool call for five years of daily prices dumps tens of thousands of tokens into the context window. And data vendors pack dozens of tools into a single MCP server, schemas alone can eat 50k+ tokens before the agent does anything useful. So we auto-generate typed Python modules from the MCP schemas at workspace init and upload them into the sandbox. The agent just imports them like a normal library. Only a one-line summary per server stays in the prompt. We have around 80…
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15
I've been building a tool that changes how LLM coding agents explore codebases, and I wanted to share it along with some early observations. Typically claude code globs directories, greps for patterns, and reads files with minimal guidance. It works in kind of the same way you'd learn to navigate a city by walking every street. You'll eventually build a mental map, but claude never does - at least not any that persists across different contexts. The Recursive Language Models paper from Zhang, Kraska, and Khattab at MIT CSAIL introduced a cleaner framing. Instead of cramming everything into…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 16
We developed a new framework that enables flexible control of generated text in language models. By combining several models and/or system prompts in one mathematical formula, it lets you tweak your style and combine model outputs with ease. A handy tool for those working with LLMs, looking for more fine-grained control of stylistic output. More details in our paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.14479. Feedback and potential applications are welcome.
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17
Build source-backed knowledge bases with Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, or any AI agent. Export Project Knowledge Checkpoints, apply personal specialist review methods, shape Ideas, and promote approved work into Projects.
Jun 2026 · llm-wiki.net · its alternatives →
- 18
Hi HN - Marcello and Vaibhav here. We built smolmodels to experiment with using LLMs for ML development. It's a fully open-source library that generates complete model training and inference code from natural language descriptions. It combines graph search with LLM code generation to find a model that gives as good predictions as possible. The core idea is that LLMs are overkill for a lot of predictive tasks. Smolmodels automates the trial-and-error process of finding the right model architecture and training approach, letting you build small, specialised models. You can either provide your…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19
To know what models don't say out loud. Contribute to ninjahawk/Subtext development by creating an account on GitHub.
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20
An all-in-one blog for learning LLM ins and outs: tokenize, attention, PE, and more Project I've been diving deep into the internals of Large Language Models (LLMs) and started documenting my findings. My blog covers topics like: Tokenization techniques (e.g., BBPE) Attention mechanism (e.g. MHA, MQA, MLA) Positional encoding and extrapolation (e.g. RoPE, NTK-aware interpolation, YaRN) Architecture details of models like QWen, LLaMA Training methods including SFT and Reinforcement Learning If you're interested in the nuts and bolts of LLMs, feel free to check it out:…
2025 · comfyai.app · its alternatives →
- 21
https://medium.com/@theaniketgiri/three-months-ago-i-wanted-...
Oct 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22IG
Data automation and visualization platform for spreadsheet users.
2024 · columns.ai · its alternatives →
- 23
Hi, I was a corporate lawyer for many years working with a lot of financial services and insurance companies. In practicing law, I noticed there was a lot of repetition in the tasks I was working on even as a highly paid attorney that could be automated. I wanted to solve the problem of dealing with a lot information and data in a practical way, using AI. This motivated me to start AI Bloks/LLMWare with my husband, who had a deep background in software and is a very early adopter of AI. We have been on this journey with our open source project LLMWare for the past 4 months, producing a…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24
I’ve been building an interactive 3D + 2D visualization of GPT-2. It displays real activations and attention scores extracted from GPT-2 Small (124M) during a forward pass. The goal is to make it easier to learn how LLMs work by showing what is happening inside the model. The 3D part is built with Three.js, and the 2D part is built with plain HTML/CSS/JS. Would love to hear your thoughts or feedback!
Mar 2026 · llm-visualized.com · its alternatives →
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