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devenjarvis
lathe
Go2026–2026
devenjarvis / lathe

lathe

Generate hands-on, multi-part technical tutorials on demand, with LLM skills tuned to make content approachable. Then you work through them yourself, by hand ✋

2Distinct people
4Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.7KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Generate hands-on, multi-part technical tutorials on demand, with LLM skills tuned to make content approachable. Then you work through them yourself, by hand ✋

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by week4 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2026-06-07 11:16:46 UTC to 2026-08-09 21:10:16 UTC. Weeks start Monday, UTC.

0122026-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-06-08 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 commentsJun 12026-06-08 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-06-15 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-06-15 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-06-22 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2026-06-22 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-06-29 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-06-29 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-07-06 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 commentsJun 292026-07-06 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-07-13 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-07-13 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-07-20 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-07-20 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-07-27 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-07-27 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-08-03 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-08-03 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-08-10 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 commentsAug 3

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
Jun 12026-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-06-08 00:00:00 UTC110
Jun 82026-06-08 00:00:00 UTC2026-06-15 00:00:00 UTC000
Jun 152026-06-15 00:00:00 UTC2026-06-22 00:00:00 UTC101
Jun 222026-06-22 00:00:00 UTC2026-06-29 00:00:00 UTC000
Jun 292026-06-29 00:00:00 UTC2026-07-06 00:00:00 UTC000
Jul 62026-07-06 00:00:00 UTC2026-07-13 00:00:00 UTC000
Jul 132026-07-13 00:00:00 UTC2026-07-20 00:00:00 UTC000
Jul 202026-07-20 00:00:00 UTC2026-07-27 00:00:00 UTC000
Jul 272026-07-27 00:00:00 UTC2026-08-03 00:00:00 UTC000
Aug 32026-08-03 00:00:00 UTC2026-08-10 00:00:00 UTC202

What Hacker News says

4 sources
I literally just started playing around with Lathe (https://github.com/devenjarvis/lathe) which was shared here on HN a few weeks back. There are some things I have been wanting to learn more about (some for work, some for personal desire), and I used it to generate a tutorial about some of the things. I have been very pleased with the results so far. I was able to tune the tutorial to exactly what I want to learn, and it did a very good job (at least that i have seen so far). It has made learning fun, since I get to learn exactly what I want, and I can ask the AI questions and have it make changes to the tutorial in real time as i am working through it. Now, will I keep using this at a rate to fully offset all of the thinking i have stopped doing since i started using AI? I am not sure, I guess time will tell.
In Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

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

Hey HN! Lathe is an experiment in using LLMs to teach me something new, instead of doing the work for me. It generates a hands-on, source-backed tutorial for any technical topic you want to learn. Then you work through it yourself by reading and typing the code by hand (gasp) in a local UI built for exactly that. It's a Go CLI plus LLM agent skills (Claude Code / Cursor / Codex). You prompt something like "/lathe build a 3D slicer in Erlang", run `lathe serve` to spin up a local webapp, and read it in your browser. Every tutorial comes with the things that have made self-learning a pleasant experience for me in the past: - table of contents that follows along as you scroll - side-notes that nudge you to think - exercises for the reader - sources backing up the content that you can use to take you deeper To help make up for the lack of hum
Read the rest
an brainpower behind the tutorial, you can also ask questions about the content, have another LLM verify the tutorial actually compiles and runs, or extend it with another part (no more "Part 4 of 6" that hasn't seen an update since 2021). I didn't build lathe to replace human-written tutorials. I built lathe because I _love_ human-written tutorials, but wanted to learn technical domains where no good human-written tutorial exists yet (building a 3D slicer from scratch, making embedded Zig approachable, etc). There's a longer story in the README about how I got started with programming through PSP homebrew tutorials, and why losing that to LLMs bugged me enough to build this. I'm not here to sell you anything (there's nothing close to a VC-backed startup here :D). It's an LLM, and its output is usually good but not perfect by any means. So far, my experience is that because you're the one typing and actually engaged, you catch the weird stuff (and I'm finding that pushing back on it is its own kind of learning). And yes, it's vibecoded, because it's low scope, low risk, and scratching a personal itch. I run it on Claude Code + macOS personally, other setups should work but I haven't been able to verify them yet. If you can find resources to learn something that was written by a human, read that first. But Lathe is here to fill in the gaps when that isn't the case, and I hope it serves as an example where LLMs can help us think better, rather than less. Repo: https://github.com/devenjarvis/lathe Would love your feedback if you decide to check it out!
402 points · Open discussion

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