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Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it
Hey HN!
Lathe is an experiment in using LLMs to teach me something new, instead of doing the work for me. It generates a hands-on, source-backed tutorial for any technical topic you want to learn. Then you work through it yourself by reading and typing the code by hand (gasp) in a local UI built for exactly that.
It's a Go CLI plus LLM agent skills (Claude Code / Cursor / Codex). You prompt something like "/lathe build a 3D slicer in Erlang", run `lathe serve` to spin up a local webapp, and read it in your browser. Every tutorial comes with the things that have made self-learning a pleasant experience for me in the past:
- table of contents that follows along as you scroll
- side-notes that nudge you to think
- exercises for the reader
- sources backing up the content that you can use to take you deeper
To help make up for the lack of human brainpower behind the tutorial, you can also ask questions about the content, have another LLM verify the tutorial actually compiles and runs, or extend it with another part (no more "Part 4 of 6" that hasn't seen an update since 2021).
I didn't build lathe to replace human-written tutorials. I built lathe because I _love_ human-written tutorials, but wanted to learn technical domains where no good human-written tutorial exists yet (building a 3D slicer from scratch, making embedded Zig approachable, etc). There's a longer story in the README about how I got started with programming through PSP homebrew tutorials, and why losing that to LLMs bugged me enough to build this.
I'm not here to sell you anything (there's nothing close to a VC-backed startup here :D). It's an LLM, and its output is usually good but not perfect by any means. So far, my experience is that because you're the one typing and actually engaged, you catch the weird stuff (and I'm finding that pushing back on it is its own kind of learning). And yes, it's vibecoded, because it's low scope, low risk, and scratching a personal itch. I run it on Claude Code + macOS personally, other setups should work but I haven't been able to verify them yet.
If you can find resources to learn something that was written by a human, read that first. But Lathe is here to fill in the gaps when that isn't the case, and I hope it serves as an example where LLMs can help us think better, rather than less.
Repo: https://github.com/devenjarvis/lathe https://github.com/devenjarvis/lathe
Would love your feedback if you decide to check it out!
- 4b11b4 3mo agoI like the idea and I know you explicitly address this but wonder if still it could search for human made works for you to learn from first If it does find some, maybe it could supplement them instead of just from scratch
- williamsss 3mo agoThis is similar to how I’ve transitioned to learning new programming languages. I used to build stuff to learn. However, with AI assisted coding I don’t have those organic moments I’m stuck and need to search online for the answer. My learning process now uses Claude Code to serve as a tutor that creates bite sized lessons writing parts I want to re-review, found confusing, what lessons were reviewed and what is next into a long lived CLUADE.md file.
- claudiosilva 3mo ago[flagged]
- james_marks 3mo agoLove this idea, can’t wait to try it. Thank you for sharing!
- devenjarvis 3mo agoThanks for checking it out!
- tatjam 3mo agoThis is a very cool idea, feels like a sane way to use LLMs in this crazy time! Could be a very good way to break the ice when starting a new project and everything is friction.
- devenjarvis 3mo agoYea that’s definitely been a primary usecase for me! Easing the barrier to entry into a new project, and giving me the foundation to take it further on my own once I’m comfortable.
- esafak 3mo agoI just use https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/education/guided-learning/ https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/educatio... and similar features of other AIs.
- ramon156 3mo agoWhat I'm more looking at is your own experience with a vibed tool. I cannot really tell from this introduction whether you actually use and like it (you mentioned you use it and sometimes push back, which is a learning strategy of its own?) Also, I wouldn't say "have another model test the tutorial compiles" a feature, but also I do not expect a fool-proof tutorial from a one-shot, I guess. Not sure why I would try this over a hand-written promot. Also wondering why ChatGPT Study mode failed, it seemed interesting.
- devenjarvis 3mo agoI've been using it quite a bit and I like it a lot! You certainly could roll your own prompt for this. The value I'm seeing is in the reusable skill/prompt to structure tutorials in a way that help me think and learn a new concept (rather than Claude just giving me code to copy/paste), and the local UI that makes working through the tutorial much more pleasant than scrolling through Claude's markdown output. Plus tutorial series are persistent so I can easily come back around later with a `/lathe-extend` to explore an extension to a topic/tutorial I'm interested in. That said, it's been a tool that's been helpful for me personally, but doesn't have to be for everyone! I've never used ChatGPT Study, I'll look into it more. Thanks for sharing!
- kaeluka 3mo agogreat, i'll try this. something like this has on my list and i'm super curious :)
- schmorptron 3mo agoCool project! I'll be trying it out. I've been a big fan of throwing whatever sources I have on a new topic i'm trying to get into into a llm "project" and then asking it to teach me, grounded on the actual content to speed things up. But at the same time, I'm afraid getting everything laid out for you in exactly the way you want will erode some of the understanding you build by going through a primary source directly and figuring things out the hard way. So this having more focus on actually doing stuff by yourself seems right up my alley (while still tending to the LLM induced intellecutal laziness... ) .
- andrewvu0203 3mo ago[dead]
- dchuk 3mo agoI’ve been using this general pattern - a custom cli app for deterministic tasks, skills for the agent harness, run the skills in the agent and it produces artifacts for you by using the cli and its own agentic reasoning - a lot lately for work. Things like “give me an executive brief of the activity in these teams backlogs over the last month” and in 5-10 minutes I have a few page doc I can read that is cited with the tickets it analyzed and I don’t have to go bug people or ask them to do yet another task for me, just make sure your backlog is updated and detailed like normal practice. It’s awesome and really fits a useful spot between pure agent usage (which is hard to get consistent results from on repeat tasks) and not having to build/buy a full blown app for every random thing.
- devenjarvis 3mo agoI agree! I want to say I first saw this pattern in some work Simon Willison did (Rodney and Showboat). For certain workflows the pair of Skills + CLI give me a nice balance between the flexibility of LLMs and the consistency of a CLI.
- edot 3mo agoCan you give some examples of the deterministic tasks? So in your example, was the deterministic task “fetch this team’s backlog”? And then the LLM parts are “process each backlog” and “combine a summary”?
- dchuk 3mo agoGenerally it’s things like that yes, but also stuff like preparing the pulled content to be summarized and then taking those summary batches and preparing for synthesis in a templated format
- derefr 3mo agoThis approach works well, I agree. But I keep wishing that I could invert it. The architecture I feel like I keep yearning for, is a traditional CLI program that encodes most workflow knowledge/decisions as real code; but which does "just a little bit of coding agent invocation" during one specific workflow step. Not sure how to accomplish this. Anyone have any suggestions? Are there libraries for this yet? (And how would they even work? It feels like, to do this right, there would have to be some background service that CLI software could expect to interact with via a well-known local IPC socket — similar to how e.g. the docker daemon works. But I'm unaware of any coding agent software/frameworks that expose such an IPC capability...)
- mixtureoftakes 3mo agoWe have notebooklm at home? Is there any comparison between these two, looks nice
- devenjarvis 3mo agoThanks for sharing NotebookLM, I hadn't seen that! I'll take a look and add a comparison to the README if it's compelling.
- troymc 3mo agoIn my opinion, the coolest thing in NotebookLM is the podcast-episode-generator. Each one sounds like two people having a conversation. It's fun to listen to a podcast episode about some niche topic (e.g. nuclear isomers, or the Weyl curvature tensor) while I'm cooking or driving.
- 28304283409234 3mo agoNice! I do this now locally with LLMS and ollama and my own havky prompts. I could not find if this also supports ollama?
- devenjarvis 3mo agoThanks for checking it out! ollama wasn't top of my list for support, just because I don't have a machine powerful enough to run decent local LLMs (I wish I did!). I'll look into it though, nothing here should be locked in to any one LLM, as long as it has the concept of a skill/slash command/reusable prompt. Someone else asked about Gemini, so I think broader LLM support will be my focus for v0.4.0
- urax 3mo ago[dead]
- xyzsparetimexyz 3mo ago[flagged]
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- threecheese 3mo agoDid you write the skill.md files yourself? I often wonder this; there’s so much text in most skills, and I can’t imagine it’s human generated. I don’t write my own - I can’t optimize for the models understanding, and so I just give the skill-creator skill an outline and then have it refine until the output is what I want.
- d4rkp4ttern 3mo agoA related idea is to have the LLM quiz you, Socratic-style about a topic of interest. It persists in asking questions at deeper levels until you arrive at the answer yourself. This forces you to think hard about a problem, and this effort helps with understanding, learning and retention. Of course I made a Socratic-quiz skill for this, to use with any coding agent or similar: https://pchalasani.github.io/claude-code-tools/plugins-detail/workflow/#socratic-quiz https://pchalasani.github.io/claude-code-tools/plugins-detai... For example I’ve used this to better understand counter-intuitive things about diabetes/insulin, dopamine and motivation, Claude’s implementations, etc (to combat so-called cognitive debt). Strong LLMs are surprisingly good at this type of quizzing, they display a semblance of “theory of mind”.
- rdksu 3mo agoI have updated the popular /grill-me skill for this exact purpose! I had a very insightful grilling session yesterday on what exactly happens when you try to load an extremely large dataset in pandas, covering everything down to the last detail !
- smallerize 3mo agoDo you have that version published anywhere?
- f311a 3mo ago> If you can find resources to learn something that was written by a human, read that first. But Lathe is here to fill in the gaps when that isn't the case Well, but it will still serve you content from humans, but without any attribution.
- TonyAlicea10 3mo agoThere is of course a degree of true usefulness to this. However I’ve been a technical educator for years and I’ve tried to do lots with LLMs. Even now, LLMs are terrible educators. They do not make coherent progressive curriculums. They hallucinate details which the student will not have the knowledge to challenge. If you use an LLM to make a tutorial you will get some benefit for sure, especially if you use it for Socratic sessions based on a corpus of data you provide (like a blog post or documentation). Don’t expect it to teach you reliably though. It feels good to ask the LLM whatever you want, but if you’re learning a topic you don’t have the instinct to realize when it’s giving you a poorly chosen progression of information or teaching you something flat out untrue.
- devenjarvis 3mo agoReally appreciate your perspective here! I do _not_ have a background in technical education, and am certain you've used and seen the failure modes of LLMs in this space far more than I have so far. A few thoughts based on my limited experience building and using lathe: - Part of the lathe skills are to first find source materials to base curriculum on. It's not foolproof by any means, nor is it a novel approach, but it's helped ground the content in reality more than an open ended prompt usually does (in my experience) - We're scoped to tutorials, over full blown curriculum. I found having lathe write one part of a tutorial series at a time, over the whole thing at once, usually gave me better results (and is why `/lathe-extend` is a thing) - To your point about not having the instinct to realize when it's giving me a poor progression or untrue content, my experience is that by actually writing the program the tutorial walks me through, I get definitive proof of if the results are true or not. One of the most impactful (and all too frequent) answers I got as a young programmer was "write a program and find out" and it's still good advice today. Not at all proposing this makes lathe tutorials infallible, but in the context and scope of the project it seems to take the bite out of the worst failure modes here. That said, maybe that implies lathe is most useful and least dangerous in the hands of an experience developer looking to learn a new domain, over someone looking to build foundational technical (and technical learning) skills? I'll think that over! I'm really curious what your experience would lead you to think about the above though? Are there critical failure modes for LLMs writing hands on technical education I just haven't tripped over yet?
- Sathwickp 3mo agoMaybe add voice to it so that it reads the tutorial out loud and listen to it lessons on the move?
- mmarian 3mo agoI think you're tackling an interesting area. I was thinking of something similar for system design prep. I experimented with a couple of series of blog posts - one for designing Twitter, another for WhatsApp: https://prepcommons.com/ https://prepcommons.com/. Still, it took a lot more effort than just delivering the initial request. AI makes everyone produce something average but you still need taste to produce something good - I guess this applies to courses too.
- visarga 3mo agoI just use md files to plan questions, track my answers, and implement rehearsals for concepts that need more repetition from claude code. And I start from a good book or documentation as source material, first the agent reads the learning material and structures it for learning.
- agnitripathi 3mo ago[flagged]
- Arubis 3mo agoFor a somewhat hybrid approach here, have a look at https://github.com/DrCatHicks/learning-opportunities https://github.com/DrCatHicks/learning-opportunities — the idea is to be used during “productive work” (so it’s not purely learning-oriented as with your repo here), and to interject as you work to ensure that you learn related concepts as you go.
- andai 3mo agoHey this is neat! I was telling my friend the other day. The way you learn programming is by typing code out by hand. And I suggested using LLMs to generate minimal educational examples aligned with his interests and needs. I've tried the Zed Shaw method to learning programming (just typing out code examples by hand -- doing "studies", the same way you would with music or art). I tested it on a programming language I had been learning for a while and was struggling with. After just a few hours of typing my fluency had skyrocketed. I realized that in several hours of typing I had written more code than in weeks of study. Because when you don't know a language yet, producing code is extremely slow and error prone. But typing out correct code is relatively straightforward. So due to changing my approach to "just blindly typing", I got more practice (at least as far as reading and muscle memory goes) in a few hours than the previous few weeks. Now of course understanding is important too, but it's a separate dimension, and largely comes after memory and fluency in my experience. (Understanding something theoretically and being able to use it are two very different things!) The general principle here is Stephen Krashen's Input Hypothesis of language acquisition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis) which says a baby learns language by just hearing stuff -- just being exposed to inputs -- and that adults can learn the same way too. And I heard it on the excellent website (now defunct?) All Japanese All The Time, where the author tested the hypothesis on himself by mostly listening to a lot of Japanese and gained fluency in a year. https://web.archive.org/web/20080705194055/http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20080705194055/http://www.alljap...
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- mobiuscog 3mo agoI have been using a similar skill (built over a few iterations) that builds whatever I ask, through a series of milestones, and then creates a full tutorial to follow in markdown and uses zola to turn it into a full static site. 90% of my Claude usage is getting it to write me guides, that I can then spend most of my time following to build the end results. Keeps the brain healthy and also provides bespoke learning, rather than a generic course off the internet. Definitely a great use of AI.
- Galanwe 3mo agoIt's very cool, and I can really see myself use that, but not in that form of deliverable. See the best place I learn and read through materials is when I'm commuting. Far away from a console. Could you envision a way to deliver this as a web app linked to e.g. an OpenRouter/Anthropic/OpenAI API key?
- conchaestrada 3mo ago[flagged]
- nomel 3mo agoI think there's going to be the exact and precise range of people there has always been: some people are curious, and want/need to understand what they're doing, some people are not and just want to do. That want/need is a fundamental personality trait what makes an expert. LLM are a dream come true for these curious types. They'll only be accelerated by them. I don't think there's any real "loss" out there, just a bunch of people that don't care boing things easier. Good for them, good for the curious people. Net win.
- embedding-shape 3mo agoI guess I'm both people, depends on what it is and what other things I'm doing. Sometimes it's fun and interesting to delve deeply (oh no he didn't) into something for long periods of time, just for the sake of exploring and understanding. Sometimes I'm not curious about why something specifically doesn't work, I just need it to work so I'll hack around it any way possible so I can move on with what I really wanted to do. I find that LLMs are useful for both cases in the end.
- FeteCommuniste 3mo agoSome people will probably be curious regardless of their environment but I think there are others who could be swayed into developing curiosity (or not) by life experiences. And an ever-present "just gimme the answer now" button could be a powerful force pulling them toward the "incurious" side.
- dtj1123 3mo agoThe issue is that there are now different expectations surrounding velocity and apparent productivity. Previously an individual new to web development might have genuinely needed to develop an understanding of web protocols, HTML and other stuff in that domain in addition to actually wanting to wrap their head around it. Nowadays spending the time required to understand how a website works carries a heavy opportunity cost, at least in the short term.
- suprjami 3mo agoAn organisation which lets a person release a website without understanding how the web works is just asking for trouble. This was true before Transformer LLMs and is true after them. LLMs probably just let those organisations make a larger and more load-bearing website faster, so that poor decisions speed the time to catastrophe.
- zjy71055 3mo agoI've had claude write my rust tools for a year without learning any rust. gonna try this to finally learn it for real.
- hbwang2076 3mo ago[dead]
- felixlu2026 3mo ago[flagged]
- gnabgib 3mo ago(Please) Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans. > https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- uptodatenews 3mo ago[dead]
- zuzululu 3mo agoI think this is quite a refreshing idea LLM's big point is that it is an excellent learning tool Lot of people want to generate stuff from it but perhaps overlooked is the knowledge you can gain from it it is the best tutor you will ever have! btw it sucks that you have to disclose if you are trying to make a buck from a project or not. Making money shouldn't be vilified or frowned upon.
- isabellehue 3mo ago[flagged]
- aleksandre_dev 3mo ago[flagged]
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- tam159 3mo agoDo you have any evaluations/ comparisons between small open source LLM and frontier LLM in the Lathe?
- knightops_dev 3mo ago[flagged]
- helixfelix 3mo agoCan I use this to learn about a complex private repo or how it does things?
- sspoisk 3mo ago[flagged]
- urax 3mo ago[flagged]
- te_chris 3mo agoNice. I've got Claude code teaching me maths at the moment. Some skills, file system learning log, oss text books and a full curriculum based on Math Academy (which I was doing before but got bored of) and UK high school and university. Teaching me concept-first though. So we start with something complex and go up and down until I get it all. It's not necessarily thorough for everything, but the depth of my intuition is much better and each time I use it I find myself unlocking another sector of the map. I love LLMs for this.
- mattjoyce 3mo agoOh my, this sounds like an idea I have been toying with. I really want a tutor to explain how random repos I find work. Do you think Lathe could be adapted to use a codebase as the source material?
- danielmai 3mo ago[flagged]
- mklifelife 3mo agoI like the focus on learning rather than replacing learning. One risk with AI tools is that people can become very productive without actually understanding the underlying domain. Tools that help users learn while using AI feel much more sustainable long term.
- pechenkactrld 3mo ago[dead]
- tobbe2064 3mo agoThis looks really nice ill check this out
- danielmai 3mo ago[flagged]
- robinvdvleuten 3mo ago[flagged]