# Lathe Lathe generates **hands-on, multi-part technical tutorials on demand ; then makes you work through them yourself, by hand**. It's a deliberate counter-move to LLMs that "think for you": instead of an agent solving the problem, Lathe uses the LLM as a *teacher* that produces a tutorial, and you do the actual work. Built by Deven Jarvis. > Generate hands-on, multi-part technical tutorials on demand…then work through them yourself, by hand ✋ ## The idea Modern AI-assisted coding removes the productive struggle that makes you actually learn ; the "aha" moment from working a problem yourself. Lathe keeps the LLM in a pedagogical role: it researches and writes the tutorial; you keep the keyboard. It's AI-assisted *education* tooling, not an [[How Coding Agents Work|agent]] that ships code for you. ## How it works - Run `/lathe` commands inside [[Claude Code]], [[Cursor CLI|Cursor]], or [[Codex CLI|Codex]] to generate a multi-part tutorial ([[AI Agent Skills|skills]] run interactively in your LLM session) - The skill calls back to a local [[Go]] CLI (`lathe store`) to persist tutorials under `~/.lathe/tutorials/` - A local web server renders them at `localhost:4242` ; purpose-built UI with table-of-contents navigation and side-notes, full-text search, filtering, and library management - `/lathe-verify` runs a verification skill to check the tutorial - Documents the **research trail** (sources consulted) and supports customizable writing voices (plainspoken, companion, or your own) - Fully **local, no cloud dependency** ; all content stays offline and searchable ## Stack & install [[Go]] CLI with an HTML/CSS frontend. MIT-licensed. Active development (v0.3.0 as of June 2026). ```bash brew install lathe # macOS; install script or `go install` also available ``` ## Why it's interesting Most AI dev tooling optimizes for *doing the work faster*. Lathe optimizes for *learning durably* by reintroducing friction on purpose ; a contrarian but coherent stance in a landscape racing to automate the human out of the loop. ## References - GitHub: https://github.com/devenjarvis/lathe - Hacker News discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48433756 ## Related - [[Claude Code]] - [[Cursor CLI]] - [[Codex CLI]] - [[AI Agent Skills]] - [[Go]] - [[How Coding Agents Work]]