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Ask HN: Anyone using LLMs as coach or therapist?
3 points by dacke 425 days ago
Is anyone else using LLMs as a coach or therapist. I'm currently exploring local LLMs as a way to enhance my journaling practice with a coach or therapist. Would love to get some inspiration and ideas on how others are doing this and which tools you use?
3 comments
ben_w 425 days ago
Not for journaling or therapy, but almost every time I draft something in German, I ask a model to "rate my German" so that I keep improving.

Before chat models, I did something similar with Google Translate, but GT doesn't tell me why things should be different; and worse, GT tends to auto-correct typos, leading to stuff like this: https://translate.google.com/?sl=de&tl=en&text=Schweinwerfer...

("Schweinwerfer", spelled like that, would actually mean "pig thrower": Schein (shine) vs Schwein (pig))

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aaronbaugher 425 days ago
Not exactly on purpose, but I used Grok for some business planning, and now it sometimes loops that into other answers, suggesting how something else I asked about could overlap with the business project, or just asking at the end, "So, would you like to work on [other project] some more?" It's a little reminder that I wanted to get back to that project, which doesn't hurt since I tend to procrastinate or get distracted and forget about projects.

I think to be a real "coach" they'd have to be able to push you proactively. You can script that kind of thing, but if you're getting that done, maybe you don't need much pushing.

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dacke 425 days ago
The proactive piece would be key for me as well. My challenge right now is to find the right setup for leveraging my journals and notes and a local llm for this (don't want to share such personal data with openai, google, etc.)
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toomuchtodo 425 days ago
A friend is using ChatGPT as a kink and poly aware pseudo therapist, keeping in mind the limitations of the system, considering the challenge of finding a human version tuned for such a lifestyle.
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dacke 425 days ago
Interesting, no worries with privacy when using chatgpt?
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toomuchtodo 425 days ago
This is not a concern they have. YTMMV (your threat model may vary, n=1). I offered to wire up ollama or deepseek for them and they shrugged. If you want to host local, consider https://github.com/OpenHealthForAll/open-health and https://github.com/johnbean393/Sidekick as patterns. Please consider open sourcing whatever you build.
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