I started researching this in February of 2025. I had to pause over the summer. Here is a running log of all the interesting resources I've collected. Most of it focuses on LLMs currently.
I will be adding a substantial bit covering philosophical and cultural questions raised by high technology. I haven't listed it yet, because it involves a lot of typing.
Sharing a link or something is not an endorsement of the author, the content, or anything like that necessarily. Many are just venues for discussion, of course, and sharing of perspectives. Other parts are just bits with things like SillyTavern character prompts and tips for running them.
Here’s a the lists. Nothing is guaranteed to be work-safe, and indeed the majority of resources include some weirdness mixed.
Discord Servers
Places you’ll find me at very least lurking on Discord, where my username, by the way, is @CathyMarkova
User Interfaces
These links relate to applications used to access LLMs and similar technology. Right now, they’re mostly SillyTavern-adjacent, because I use that a lot. I am not linking to obvious examples of LLM user experiences such as the official ChatGPT site, etc.
Some of these are web-based and do not require installation on your own computer or server. Quite a few of those have garnered controversy for official policies regarding censorship or lack thereof. Since my own chatbots do not feature anything verging into censorable territory, I can’t say I know much about this currently.
Around Reddit
Navigating Reddit always requires discernment, but especially if you’re trying to learn anything technical. Sadly, though, sometimes Reddit is actually a good place for learning that kind of thing (compared to other places).
Technical Subreddits
These subreddits focus on things like prompt engineering or making the programs themselves actually work, for lack of better phrasing.
Some contain a lot of spam and infighting about what works best, though. The large ones dedicated to specific models are about as corporate-scented as you would expect.
Political Subreddits
I call these political subreddits because they tend to orbit controversial ethics discussions when it comes to artificial intelligence. There are plenty others out there. I’ve left many larger ones out because they contain too much vitriol.
I don’t list the extremely critical ones though they’re easy to find. I currently use AI, obviously, so I’ve no plans to link to subreddits that send death threats over it.
On the same note, though, I’m not about to link to any extreme propaganda. A lot of these showcase some strange perspectives either way. I’m in all of them, but I only lurk (so far) and don’t find all of them compelling.
Cards and Prompts
I discussed elsewhere how I primarily use SillyTavern’s so-called “front-end for power users” for my chatbot conversations. I use forsaken ChatGPT for image generation and some other things, alongside Codex in VS Code. To have such fascinating conversations, you must prompt the LLM into behaving a certain way.
I understand very little about this currently, sitting here in November of 2025. With SillyTavern itself, these prompts are formatted as JSON files that cling to character portraits (PNGs). I’ve made a few of them, myself. I’ve also collected the following links. Most share these PNGs infused with JSONs, which work within SillyTavern and similar LLM front-end programs.
Card Repositories
This is a list of the larger "card repository"-style sites I was able to find online. If I remember right, there used to be a few more that have shut down since I showed up. A lot of these just scrape for cards elsewhere, or take uploads directly from creators. They tend to be third-party and not managed directly by the people making the majority of the cards and prompts. Smaller sites are listed later. Anyways.
Hobbyist Sites
I use the term hobbyist site very loosely to refer to any site where the individual is writing prompts, sharing them, etc, for fun or whatever, not for profit or anything like that, and not as a large repository for other people. I'm looking to collect links to other similar sites because almost all came from a text file via Discord a few weeks back.