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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

#61

A 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-…

if your power is LLM, what are you without it ???

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

#62

A 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-…

if your power is LLM, what are you without it ???

Without it, I was a stack overflow lurker, and before that a forum reader

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

#63
I 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.

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

#64
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if your power is LLM, what are you without it ???

Without it, I was a stack overflow lurker, and before that a forum reader

i suspect a lot of us started out as encyclopedia readers before we discovered that strangers on the internet would answer questions for free

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

#68
post #50

I 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 b…

The 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.

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

#70
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I reverted this due to impending billing changes, but Claude and most LLM providers to my knowledge do offer a way to directly fire a prompt to the LLM in a "headless" or non-interactive mode. Specifically "claude -p " is the way to do it with Claude Code. It allows for using the agent to do a one-off command with a given structured prompt. Originally Lathe would use this from the Go application to allow you to exten…

That's almost it, yes. But in my experience, to actually get where they're going quickly (as opposed to spending hours and hundreds of dollars stumbling around in the dark), coding agents generally need more interactive hand-holding than that. If you just fire off one non-interactive session and wait for it to come to a stop, the problem usually isn't fully+correctly solved at the point at the LLM decides to "finish.…

> Basically, think of this not as the CLI program saying to an agent "answer me this question" or "edit this file for me", but rather, the CLI program popping open a mini "guided + 99%-of-the-time automated" TUI coding-agent micro-IDE "inside" the workflow, in about the same way that git pops open your EDITOR inside `git commit`.

Isn't this simply having your mechanistic script call `claude "Prompt that is well honed to provide a mini, guided, 99%-of-the-time automated LLM action to $THE_THING"`? And, possibly including some `--allowed-tools`?

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