The Culpeper Séance: An Offline RAG Séance with Nicholas Culpeper

Описание и применение

Веб‑чат, основанный на книге Николаса Кульппера, использует локальный RAG и открытые модели для безопасного предоставления информации о травах, сопровождающейся проверенными современными оценками токсичности.

Задача

Provide accurate, grounded herbal information from a historical text while ensuring modern safety warnings and preventing hallucinations.

Результат

An offline, privacy‑preserving herbal chatbot that delivers historically grounded answers with verified modern safety verdicts, built entirely with open‑source components.

Рабочий процесс

• Clone repo and set up environment
• Run "make ingest" to download, parse, chunk, embed the Gutenberg text into Chroma
• Start Flask API and Vite UI with "make dev"
• Interact via UI or POST /api/ask, receiving streamed ghost text and verdict metadata
• Optionally swap chat or embed models via .env without code changes

Доказательства

The Culpeper Séance is an offline séance that channels Nicholas Culpeper (1616–1654)—the English herbalist and astrologer—so you can ask him about plants in the voice of a gentle, slightly eerie ghost.

Источник

When the ghost names a dangerous herb, a Beyond the Veil panel stamps a modern verdict: Folklore, Plausible, Harmful, or Deadly. Those toxicity claims come from a hand‑curated verdicts.json file—they are never generated by the model at runtime.

Источник

The UI is a candlelit séance circle with streaming ghost text, a browsable grimoire of parsed herbs, and a poison cabinet for the scary ones.

Источник

The ghost’s system prompt forbids herbs, doses, or facts not present in retrieved passages. A separate grade step asks the model yes/no whether the passages could answer the question; if not, the graph rewrites the query into 17th‑century herbal vocabulary or falls back to a polite “the veil is too thick” refusal.

Источник