Get Claude to actually teach you a subject — not a one-off explanation, but a tutor that builds an Obsidian vault you own as it goes: one note per concept, linked into a prerequisite graph, with your progress, spaced-repetition reviews, and a retention record living in plain Markdown files.
It's a Claude Code skill. You say "teach me X," and it runs a diagnostic, maps the prerequisites, teaches at the edge of what you already know, checks your understanding with live questions, and writes it all to a vault that any future session can resume from — even with zero chat history.
Built for the Claude Code + Obsidian crowd. Best on well-structured technical subjects where prerequisites form a DAG (math, CS, ML, systems) — not fuzzy domains like language conversation or essay-writing.
- Dual diagnostic — it probes what you know AND decomposes the material into a prerequisite DAG, and shows you the DAG before teaching anything.
- Mastery-gated teaching — teaches 1–2 concepts at your edge with real,
link-checked sources and a worked-example → faded-practice → cold-check loop. A
concept is only
masteredwhen you reproduce the reasoning unaided. - The vault is the only state — the MOC hub + concept notes + session logs are the memory. Come back in a month with no context and it resumes exactly where you left off.
- Spaced repetition + decay — mastered concepts resurface for a quick refresh on read-time date math (expanding intervals); one review is interleaved per session.
- Efficacy — a retention report shows which concepts held vs decayed over time.
See a real vault in examples/sample-vault/ (learning
transformers from dot-product attention up) — open that folder in Obsidian to see the
graph.
- Claude Code (CLI, desktop, or IDE extension)
- Node.js ≥ 18 — for the vault check scripts (zero dependencies)
- Obsidian — optional, to view the vault as a graph (the vault is plain Markdown and works fine without it)
- git — to install
Clone this repo into your Claude Code skills directory so Claude discovers it:
git clone https://github.com/TLXyloph/learnit ~/.claude/skills/learn-anythingThat's it — no build, no dependencies. Claude Code reads SKILL.md and the skill is
live. (To scope it to one project instead of your whole machine, clone into that
project's .claude/skills/learn-anything instead.)
In Claude Code, just ask — be concrete about the capability you want:
Teach me eigenvalues and eigenvectors, up to diagonalizing a matrix by hand.
What happens next:
- It asks where your vault should live (default
~/learning-vault/) and captures your goal. - It proposes the prerequisite DAG and asks you to confirm / add / reorder — before writing any files.
- It probes what you already know (a few quick questions) so you start at the right spot — no re-teaching what you've got, no skipping over gaps.
- It teaches the first concept, checks you with a cold question, and writes the vault.
Open your vault folder in Obsidian to see the graph. Next time, just say "let's continue with <subject>" and it resumes from the files.
Type any of these instead of answering, any time:
| Command | Does |
|---|---|
skip |
Move past the current concept for now |
rewind <concept> |
Go back and revisit a specific concept |
explain / again |
Re-explain it a different way |
deeper / easier |
Adjust the depth |
status |
Where am I? what's next? what's due? |
stop |
End the session cleanly |
help |
List these |
The skill runs these for you, but you can validate any vault by hand. From the skill
directory (~/.claude/skills/learn-anything):
node scripts/validate-vault.mjs ~/learning-vault # structure: schema, links, acyclic DAG
node scripts/check-session.mjs ~/learning-vault # teaching invariants (sources, evidence, gating)
node scripts/due-review.mjs ~/learning-vault # what's due for spaced review
node scripts/retention-report.mjs ~/learning-vault # which concepts held vs decayed
node scripts/setup-graph-colors.mjs ~/learning-vault # color the Obsidian graph by status- Full guide → — installation details, a session walkthrough, the vault format, resuming, spaced repetition, and the scripts in depth.
- Sample vault:
examples/sample-vault/
SKILL.md the skill itself — the procedures Claude follows
scripts/ zero-dependency Node validators + the decay/retention tools
lib/vault.mjs shared frontmatter/wikilink parsing
examples/sample-vault a real example vault (transformers)
tests/fixtures/ golden vaults the scripts are tested against
docs/GUIDE.md the full guide
docs/handoff.md original scope, goals, and requirements
docs/superpowers/ per-phase design specs and implementation plans
v1 — all four build phases are implemented and dogfooded: cold-start diagnostic, teaching loop, continuity + spaced repetition, and efficacy instrumentation. The data contract (the note/MOC/session-log format) is stable.