Every word in every article on this site was, for better or worse, written by me: a real human being. Recently, though, I realized that various pages on the site kinda sucked. Chiefly I'm talking about the Blog home page, tag pages like this one for articles tagged with AI and other places where I could do with some "meta-content".

By meta-content I mean content about content, like the couple of short paragraphs that summarize recent posts for a tag, or the outro text that now appears at the end of each post, along with the automatically generated Read Next recommendations that I added recently using ReadNext.

If you go look at the RSC tag, for example, you'll see a couple of paragraphs that summarize what I've written about regarding React Server Components recently. The list of article excerpts underneath it is a lot more approachable with that high-level summary at the top. Without the intro, the page just feels neglected and incomplete.

But the chances of me remembering to update that intro text every time I write a new post about React Server Components are slim to none. I'll write it once, it'll get out of date, and then it will be about as useful as a chocolate teapot. We need a better way. Ideally one that also lets me play by watching the AI stream automatically generated content before my very eyes:

Recently I posted about AI Content Recommendations with TypeScript, which concluded by introducing a new NPM package I've been working on called ReadNext. This post is dedicated to ReadNext, and will go into more detail about how to use ReadNext in Node JS, React, and other JavaScript projects.

What it is

ReadNext is a Node JS package that uses AI to generate content recommendations. It's designed to be easy to use, and can be integrated into any Node JS project with just a few lines of code. It is built on top of LangChain, and delegates to an LLM of your choice for summarizing your content to generate recommendations. It runs locally, does not require you to deploy anything, and has broad support for a variety of content types and LLM providers.

ReadNext is not an AI itself, nor does it want your money, your data or your soul. It's just a library that makes it easy to find related content for developers who use JavaScript as their daily driver. It's best used at build time, and can be integrated into your CI/CD pipeline to generate recommendations for your content as part of your build process.

How to use it

Get started in the normal way:

npm install read-next

Configure a ReadNext instance:

import { ReadNext } from 'read-next'

const readNext = await ReadNext.create({
  // optional, defaults to a temp directory
  cacheDir: '/path/to/cache'
})

Index your content:

await readNext.index({
  sourceDocuments: [
    {
      pageContent: 'This is an article about React Server Components',
      id: 'rsc'
    },
    {
      pageContent: 'This is an article about React Hooks',
      id: 'hooks'
    },
    //... as many as you like
  ]
})

In the last post, we used TypeScript to create searchable embeddings for a corpus of text content and integrated it into a chat bot. But chat bots are the tomato ketchup of AI - great as an accompaniment to something else, but not satisfying by themselves. Given that we now have the tools to vectorize our documents and perform semantic searches against them, let's extend that to generate content recommendations for our readers.

At the bottom of each of my blog articles are links to other posts that may be interesting to the reader based on the current article. The lo-fi way this was achieved was to find all the other posts which overlapped on one or more tags and pick the most recent one.

Quite often that works ok, but I'm sure you can think of ways it could pick a sub-optimal next article. Someone who knows the content well could probably pick better suggestions at least some of the time. LLMs are really well-suited to tasks like this, and should in theory have several advantages over human editors (such as not forgetting what I wrote last week).

We want to end up with some simple UI like this, with one or more suggestions for what to read next:

So how do we figure out which content to recommend based on what you're looking at?

This is the first article in a trilogy that will go through the process of extracting content from a large text dataset - my blog in this case - and making it available to an LLM so that users can get answers to their questions without searching through lots of articles along the way.

Part 1 will cover how to process your text documents for easy consumption by an LLM, throw those embeddings into a vector database, and then use that to help answer the user's questions. There are a million articles about this using Python, but I'm principally a TypeScript developer so we'll focus on TS, React and NextJS.

Part 2 covers how to make an AI-driven "What to Read Next" component, which looks at the content of an document (or blog post, in this case) and performs a semantic search through the rest of the content to rank which other posts are most related to this one, and suggest them.

Part 3 will extend this idea by using InformAI to track which articles the user has looked at and attempt to predictively generate suggested content for that user, personalizing the What to Read Next component while keeping the reader completely anonymous to the system.

Let's RAG

About a week ago I released InformAI, which allows you to easily surface the state of your application UI to an LLM in order to help it give more relevant responses to your user. In that intro post I threw InformAI into the blog post itself, which gave me a sort of zero-effort poor man's RAG, as the LLM could see the entire post and allow people to ask questions about it.

That's not really what InformAI is intended for, but it's nice that it works. But what if we want to do this in a more scalable and coherent way? This blog has around 100 articles, often about similar topics. Sometimes, such as when I release open source projects like InformAI, it's one of the only sources of information on the internet about the given topic. You can't ask ChatGPT what InformAI is, but with a couple of tricks we can transparently give ChatGPT access to the answer so that it seems like it magically knows stuff it was never trained on.

Most web applications can benefit from AI features, but adding AI to an existing application can be a daunting prospect. Even a moderate-sized React application can have hundreds of components, spread across dozens of pages. Sure, it's easy to tack a chat bot in the bottom corner, but it won't be useful unless you integrate it with your app's contents.

This is where InformAI comes in. InformAI makes it easy to surface all the information that you already have in your React components to an LLM or other AI agent. With a few lines of React code, your LLM can now see exactly what your user sees, without having to train any models, implement RAG, or any other expensive setup.

InformAI is not an AI itself, it just lets you expose components and UI events via the simple <InformAI /> component. Here's how we might add AI support to a React component that shows a table of a company's firewalls:

<InformAI
  name = "Firewalls Table"
  prompt = "Shows the user a paginated table of firewalls and their scheduled backup configurations"
  props = {{data, page, perPage}}
/>

As I mentioned in the previous post, OpenAI dropped a ton of functionality recently, with the shiny new Assistants API taking center stage. In this release, OpenAI introduced the concepts of Threads, Messages, Runs, Files and Tools - all higher-level concepts that make it a little easier to reason about long-running discussions involving multiple human and AI users.

Prior to this, most of what we did with OpenAI's API was call the chat completions API (setting all the non-text modalities aside for now), but to do so we had to keep passing all of the context of the conversation to OpenAI on each API call. This means persisting conversation state on our end, which is fine, but the Assistants API and related functionality makes it easier for developers to get started without reinventing the wheel.

OpenAI Assistants

An OpenAI Assistant is defined as an entity with a name, description, instructions, default model, default tools and default files. It looks like this:

Let's break this down a little. The name and description are self-explanatory - you can change them later via the modify Assistant API, but they're otherwise static from Run to Run. The model and instructions fields should also be familiar to you, but in this case they act as defaults and can be easily overridden for a given Run, as we'll see in a moment.

OpenAI dropped a ton of cool stuff in their Dev Day presentations, including some updates to function calling. There are a few function-call-like things that currently exist within the Open AI ecosystem, so let's take a moment to disambiguate:

• Plugins: introduced in March 2023, allowed GPT to understand and call your HTTP APIs
• Actions: an evolution of Plugins, makes it easier but still calls your HTTP APIs
• Function Calling: Chat GPT understands your functions, tells you how to call them, but does not actually call them

It seems like Plugins are likely to be superseded by Actions, so we end up with 2 ways to have GPT call your functions - Actions for automatically calling HTTP APIs, Function Calling for indirectly calling anything else. We could call this Guided Invocation - despite the name it doesn't actually call the function, it just tells you how to.

That second category of calls is going to include anything that isn't an HTTP endpoint, so gives you a lot of flexibility to call internal APIs that never learned how to speak HTTP. Think legacy systems, private APIs that you don't want to expose to the internet, and other places where this can act as a highly adaptable glue.