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.
Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it
21–30 of 94 posts
Re: Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it
#22https://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”.
Re: Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it
#23I’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…
Re: Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it
#24I’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…
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...)
Re: Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it
#25Re: Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it
#26A 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-…
The harder questions will only arrive when the context is getting full.
Re: Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it
#27I’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…
This 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…
You'd have to exec out, so it's alittle clunkier than an IPC, but I think you could achieve what you want with it.
Re: Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it
#28I’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…
This 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…
It runs as a background terminal that the agent can observe, and then exposes all interaction options as structured commands that can be run from the foreground CLI which then update the state of the background terminal via IPC. My hope is to establish a sort of “ARIA for terminals” standard to improve accessibility for both humans and agents. Email in profile, ping me if you’re interested in giving it a spin (just have plugins for Inquirer + Commander right now, hoping to broaden to other frameworks & TUIs soon).
Re: Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it
#29Well, but it will still serve you content from humans, but without any attribution.
Re: Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it
#30Even 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.