I get where you're coming from, and the intent to make it easier for people to find examples and verses, but there's a fine line with LLMs giving you answers, is that it's interpreting it in some form. Doesn't that run counter to prevailing ideology, that you're meant to either struggle with the materials / seek understanding yourself, or have your religious leaders interpret/receive those insights?

You’re correct. The hard line for me is ensuring that any scripture presented to the user is verified correct. LLMs can’t be trusted in this regard.

One feature of the app is that all scripture is verified and what’s show to the user doesn’t come from the LLM at all and instead a trusted source.

I think exploring scripture this way does not alleviate you from struggling to learn and apply it. It hasn’t for me.

I don't necessarily mean reguritating it, but choosing which part of the scripture to surface to the user is already some interpretation/choice. Even the devil can quote scripture (I'm playing the devil's advocate here).

Very true. The verses selected come from a tool call. The LLM queries the app for relevant verses. It picks the keywords - so perhaps there’s bias there but the verses are handed to the LLM.

But there are ways to control and constrain the LLMs and what the user is presented with.

These are all top of mind for me and why I felt there could be a better option than asking ChatGPT directly.

How polished is the experience, I see there is an invite link on the website.

It’s pretty polished but you’re asking the wrong person. Feedback has been positive so far :).

It doesn't prevent you from going to the source and struggle with the text, nor seek expert commentary.

What's difficult and doesn't have to be with philosophy/ spirituality is to find relevant bits off situation, theme etc.

This app does that very well, LLMs are good at entity recognition.

Yes it can point you to the right place, but choosing which part of scripture to point you to is already a choice/interpretation

> Doesn't that run counter to prevailing ideology, that you're meant to either struggle with the materials / seek understanding yourself, or have your religious leaders interpret/receive those insights?

I think it depends, Catholics wouldn't be able to use this because the Magisterium is the ultimate authority on interpreting Scripture, so the personal interpretation isn't really needed. This is not to say that Catholics don't read the Bible, they are encouraged to do so since it deepens their faith

On the other hand, for Protestant it varies, the High Church denominations are closer to Catholics (though none of them accept the Magisterium) in terms of scripture interpretation, but the Low Church ones (like Baptists or Non-Denominational ) are more open to personal interpenetration.

Disclaimer: I'm a Catholic, so if I made a mistake here fellow Protestants, please correct me.

Just let them have their AI pacifier.

I hope the irony of being concerned about hallucinations in a bible study app is not lost on you or others reading this!

Sir, you dropped your fedora.

Philosophically, I don’t believe we should outsource the accuracy of scripture to any single entity (let alone a for profit secular one).

So it’s less about model choice and more about governance of scripture.

I will check out the link you sent for sure!

I was under the impression you were getting BOOK.CHAPTER.VERSE references from the model and then sourcing them from a ground truth db.

Anyways, impressive app! We haven't tackled such an ambitious project just for it being daunting.

Took a look at StepBible. Looks really cool. My email is in my profile if you wanted to connect.

It can still generate a wrong reference and select the wrong verse.

That’s okay, IMO. Ultimately it’s the readers responsibility to apply their own intelligence. But the app should not misquote scripture itself.

All models hallucinate. Everything in production with a model will too. It is not a "deal breaker"

> Is the difference between this and a frontier model that the scripture is guaranteed to be real?

flash is suitable only for a toy apps, not for production environments :)

have you used it for anything outside of coding?

I tried using Deepseek with Claude Code and it under performed. The use I was referring to was within a product and I feel it's a lot of value for the cost.

https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/agent_integrations...