devenjarvis/lathe

Lathe

An experiment in using LLMs to teach you, rather than think for you.

Lathe generates hands-on, multi-part technical tutorials on demand, with skills tuned to make content approachable. Then you work through them yourself, by hand, in a local UI built from the ground up for pleasant learning. (Just like we did it in the stone age 😎)

<img src="docs/img/read-tutorial.png" alt="Reading a tutorial in the Lathe UI" width="800">

What is it?

• Generate hands-on technical tutorials (single-part or a multi-part series) from any prompt
• Work through the tutorial yourself in a purpose-built local UI
• Use skills to ask questions, verify the tutorial, and extend it with a new part
• Search, filter, and manage tutorials from your library
• Every tutorial documents its sources, which model was used, and what prompt drove the "voice" for the tutorial

Quick start

Lathe is a combination of LLM skills and a Golang CLI used to store, manage, and view generated tutorials. After install (below), you can generate a tutorial inside any coding agent (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI, opencode, Cline, and Windsurf supported) by prompting something like:

/lathe build a 3D Slicer in Erlang

<img src="docs/img/lathe-prompt-cc.png" alt="Prompting a coding agent with `/lathe build a 3D Slicer in Erlang`" width="800">

Then open lathe from any terminal:

lathe serve              # starts the web server, opens the browser

<img src="docs/img/tutorial-selection-light-mode.png" alt="Browsing tutorials in lathe (light mode)" width="800">

Don't worry, we also have dark mode:

<img src="docs/img/tutorial-selection-dark-mode.png" alt="Browsing tutorials in lathe (dark mode)" width="800">

Click the tutorial you want to read and start learning!

The CLI has a bunch of other commands, but honestly those were built to give the LLM a deterministic way to manage tutorials. I expect the above to be all you need (it's all I ever use) for day-to-day. If you want