Knowledge Graphs with LLMs: Building Structured Knowledge from Text

Introduction: Knowledge graphs represent information as entities and relationships, enabling powerful reasoning and querying capabilities. LLMs excel at extracting structured knowledge from unstructured text—identifying entities, relationships, and attributes that can be stored in graph databases. This guide covers building knowledge graphs with LLMs: entity and relation extraction, graph schema design, populating Neo4j and other graph […]

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Ollama: The Complete Guide to Running Open Source LLMs Locally

Introduction: Ollama has revolutionized how developers run large language models locally. With a simple command-line interface and seamless hardware acceleration, you can have Llama 3.2, Mistral, or CodeLlama running on your laptop in minutes—no cloud API keys, no usage costs, complete privacy. Built on llama.cpp, Ollama abstracts away the complexity of model quantization, memory management, […]

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LLM Output Parsing: From Raw Text to Typed Objects

Introduction: LLMs generate text, but applications need structured data. Parsing LLM output reliably is surprisingly tricky—models don’t always follow instructions, JSON can be malformed, and edge cases abound. This guide covers robust output parsing strategies: using JSON mode for guaranteed valid JSON, Pydantic for type-safe parsing, handling partial and streaming outputs, implementing retry logic for […]

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Agent Tool Selection: Building AI Agents That Choose and Use the Right Tools

Introduction: AI agents become powerful when they can use tools—searching the web, querying databases, calling APIs, executing code. But tool selection is where many agent implementations fail. The agent might choose the wrong tool, call tools with incorrect parameters, or get stuck in loops trying tools that won’t work. This guide covers practical patterns for […]

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Conversation State Management: Context Tracking, Slot Filling, and Dialog Flow

Introduction: Conversational AI applications need to track state across turns—remembering what users said, what information has been collected, and where they are in multi-step workflows. Unlike simple Q&A, task-oriented conversations require slot filling, context tracking, and flow control. This guide covers practical state management patterns: conversation context objects, slot-based information extraction, finite state machines for […]

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LLM Fine-tuning Fundamentals: When, Why, and How to Customize Language Models

Introduction: Fine-tuning transforms a general-purpose LLM into a specialized model for your specific use case. While prompt engineering works for many applications, fine-tuning offers advantages when you need consistent formatting, domain-specific knowledge, or reduced latency from shorter prompts. This guide covers practical fine-tuning: when to fine-tune versus prompt engineer, preparing training data, running fine-tuning jobs […]

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