lathe
lathe (Deven Jarvis, MIT) is "an experiment in using LLMs to teach you, rather than think for you." A Go CLI that runs as skills inside Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex (not a standalone agent) to generate hands-on, multi-part technical tutorials on demand — which you then work through yourself, by hand. The clearest augment-pole / anti-automation artifact in this wiki: a skill pack designed to prevent the agent from doing the work for you.
How it works
- Skills (slash commands):
/lathe(generate a tutorial — e.g./lathe build a 3D Slicer in Erlang),/lathe-extend(add parts),/lathe-verify(test that the tutorial's code runs),/lathe-ask(answer learner questions),/lathe-tag(metadata),/lathe-voice(custom writing style). "LLM skills tuned to make content approachable." - Workflow: generate → store locally → serve a purpose-built web UI at
localhost:4242→ read, do the exercises, optionally verify execution. Targets domains that lack human-written tutorials (obscure/emerging tech). - Stack: ~75% Go + CSS/HTML for the UI.
Why it matters here
Most tooling in this wiki pushes toward automation — agents that do the work (agentic-coding-harness, orchestration, self-improving-agents, the OpenClaw/gbrain automate pole). Lathe runs the opposite direction: it uses the same primitive (Claude Code/ Cursor/Codex agent-skills) to keep the human in the loop on purpose — "built to help you do the thinking," making you type the code and critically evaluate AI output. It is the extreme augment pole of the synthesis's augment→automate axis, and a pedagogical sibling of the "don't let the agent do everything" discipline (agent-guardrails, agents-never-do-alone). Cross-spoke: its "teach, don't do for you" stance is the agent-tooling instance of Engelbart's augmenting human intellect (research-wiki's augmenting-human-intellect) rather than replacing it.
Caveat
A solo MIT experiment / README; "an experiment" by the author's own framing — no evaluation of
learning outcomes or tutorial accuracy beyond the optional /lathe-verify execution check.
Related
agent-skills · agentic-coding-harness · agent-guardrails · agents-never-do-alone · self-improving-agents · augmenting-human-intellect