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Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it

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Re: Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it

#11

Post by devenjarvis »

ramon156 wrote: post #7

What 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 t…

I'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!

Re: Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it

#12

Post by dchuk »

I’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.

Re: Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it

#16

Post by devenjarvis »

28304283409234 wrote: post #15

Nice! I do this now locally with LLMS and ollama and my own havky prompts. I could not find if this also supports ollama?

Thanks 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

Re: Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it

#18

Post by devenjarvis »

dchuk wrote: post #12

I’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 th…

I 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.
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