# Why I Built an AI Reading Tool for Ancient Languages (And What Six Months of AI Progress Taught Me)

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/now-i-get-it-with-dr-andy-6931085/why-i-built-an-ai-reading-tool-for-ancient-languages-and-what-six-months-of-ai-progress-taught-me
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/now-i-get-it-with-dr-andy-6931085/why-i-built-an-ai-reading-tool-for-ancient-languages-and-what-six-months-of-ai-progress-taught-me.md
Podcast: [Now I Get It, with Dr. Andy](https://stenobird.com/podcast/now-i-get-it-with-dr-andy-6931085)
Published: 2026-07-23T09:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://shows.acast.com/now-i-get-it-with-dr-andy/episodes/why-i-built-an-ai-reading-tool-for-ancient-languages-and-wha
Audio file: https://sphinx.acast.com/p/open/s/665f291eaa134f001225717a/e/6a5dcf6fa87bf583f4b4adcd/media.mp3
Processing state: not_requested
JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/now-i-get-it-with-dr-andy-6931085/episodes/why-i-built-an-ai-reading-tool-for-ancient-languages-and-what-six-months-of-ai-progress-taught-me
Duration seconds: 1541

## Resource

I'm digging into something that's genuinely changed how I spend my free time: using AI to build the tool I've wished existed for decades, one that helps me read the world's great literature in its original language. I tell the story of a chance dinner with a Hertz Fellow who turned out to be a major figure at Anthropic, and how that connection eventually led me back to a project I'd tried and abandoned before, a computer-assisted reader for Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Aramaic texts. Six months ago, the AI models I tried couldn't get past writing a single working line of code. This time was different, and I walk through exactly what changed, what these models are actually good at, and where they still fall apart. I also get into the weeds a bit, sharing my process for getting better results out of these tools, why my public writing on Quora turns out to matter, and a wild multi-round debugging session with Gemini that kept insisting it had "finally" found all the bugs. I close with a personal aside into a physics insight I've been chasing since the 1970s, and how an AI helped me push it further, even if I lost most of the conversation to a very avoidable software glitch. Along the way I make my case for why AI right now is best thought of as a tireless, brilliant, but occasionally hallucinating army of interns, not a replacement for human judgment. In this episode you will learn: (00:00) How a chance dinner with a Hertz Fellow connected to Anthropic changed my skepticism about the current state of AI (03:37) Why I've always wished a computer could do the tedious lexical lookup work of reading Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Aramaic texts (06:35) What large language models actually are under the hood, and why they can "spout like an idiot" and "pontificate like a sage" with equa…

## Actions

- request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/now-i-get-it-with-dr-andy-6931085/episodes/why-i-built-an-ai-reading-tool-for-ancient-languages-and-what-six-months-of-ai-progress-taught-me/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.
- read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/now-i-get-it-with-dr-andy-6931085/why-i-built-an-ai-reading-tool-for-ancient-languages-and-what-six-months-of-ai-progress-taught-me.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.

A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed.

## Transcript

Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.