Getting Started with Kerb Toolkit
Chapter 1: Introduction and First Text Generation
Course Overview and Setup
Principles of the Toolkit
Configuring LLM Providers
Executing Your First Generation Call
Handling Streaming Responses
Chapter 2: Advanced Prompting Techniques
Introduction to Prompt Engineering
Creating Dynamic Prompts with the Template Engine
Managing and Versioning Prompts
Implementing Few-Shot Prompting
Extracting Structured Data from LLM Outputs
Parsing JSON and Code Snippets
Chapter 3: Managing Context and Tokens
The Importance of the Context Window
Counting Tokens with the Tokenizer
Strategies for Text Truncation
Managing Token Budgets for Complex Prompts
Chapter 4: Preparing Data for Retrieval
Data Loading Fundamentals
Loading Documents from Different Sources
The Rationale Behind Text Chunking
Applying Chunking Strategies
Text Preprocessing for Better Retrieval
Chapter 5: Embeddings and Semantic Search
Understanding Text Embeddings
Generating Embeddings
Fundamentals of Vector Similarity
Performing Semantic Search
Choosing an Embedding Model
Chapter 6: Building Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) Systems
Anatomy of a RAG System
Creating a Simple Retrieval Pipeline
Implementing Different Search Methods
Improving Relevance with Re-ranking
Managing Retrieved Context for Generation
Chapter 7: Building Conversational Applications with Memory
The Challenge of Stateful Conversations
Implementing Conversation Buffer Memory
Using Summary Memory for Long Conversations
Tracking Entities Across a Conversation
Chapter 8: Developing Autonomous Agents
Introduction to LLM Agents
The ReAct Pattern for Reasoning and Acting
Building a ReAct Agent
Defining and Using Tools
Implementing Plan-and-Execute Agents
Orchestrating Multi-Agent Systems
Chapter 9: Optimizing for Performance and Cost
Identifying Performance Bottlenecks
Implementing LLM Response Caching
Caching Embeddings to Reduce API Calls
Cache Invalidation Strategies
Chapter 10: Ensuring Application Safety and Reliability
Adding Safety Guardrails to Applications
Implementing Content Moderation
Detecting and Masking Personal Information
Introduction to Testing LLM Applications
Using Mocks for Deterministic Tests
Chapter 11: Advanced Capabilities
Processing Image Inputs with Multimodal Models
Benchmarking LLM Outputs with Evaluation Metrics
Preparing Datasets for Fine-Tuning
Understanding Text Embeddings
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- Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks, Nils Reimers and Iryna Gurevych, 2019 Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Association for Computational Linguistics) DOI: 10.18653/v1/D19-1410 - Introduces the Sentence-BERT architecture for state-of-the-art sentence embeddings that are optimized for semantic similarity tasks.
- OpenAI Embeddings API Reference, OpenAI, 2024 (OpenAI) - Provides detailed information and usage instructions for OpenAI's text embedding models, including
text-embedding-3-small. - Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition, Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin, 2025 (Pearson) - Provides a comprehensive introduction to natural language processing, including foundational concepts of text embeddings and vector space models (4th edition draft).
- Embedding Representations, Google Developers, 2023 (Google) - Offers a conceptual introduction to embeddings, explaining how they represent meaning and their role in machine learning.