skills-for-learning

Four Claude Code skills that cover the full learning loop — understand what exists, and learn what's new.

Skill	What it does
explain	Structures any explanation into three sections: High-Level, Break-Down, Glossary. Use for "what is…", "how does…work", "ELI5", or "walk me through…" questions.
walkthrough	Writes a revealing architectural walkthrough — a document that re-creates the experience of making a design decision instead of summarising it. Built for junior engineers reading about a PR, refactor, or architecture.
tutorial	Generates a self-contained learning repository for any software topic — theory with Mermaid diagrams plus a practice project with milestone-based TODOs the learner builds commit-by-commit.
guide	Coaches the learner through a tutorial repo. Acts as a patient senior-engineer mentor — asks questions, escalates hints, tracks weak points. Does NOT give answers unless explicitly asked.

explain and walkthrough help you understand code that already exists. tutorial and guide pair up to help you learn something new — one generates the material, the other coaches you through it without spoiling the answer.

Install

Claude Code plugin marketplace (recommended)

Inside Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add iannbing/skills-for-learning
/plugin install skills-for-learning@skills-for-learning

After install, the skills are available as /skills-for-learning:explain, /skills-for-learning:walkthrough, /skills-for-learning:tutorial, and /skills-for-learning:guide. They're also model-invoked — Claude will use them automatically when the request matches.

Update later with:

/plugin marketplace update skills-for-learning

skills.sh

npx skills add iannbing/skills-for-learning/explain
npx skills add iannbing/skills-for-learning/walkthrough
npx skills add iannbing/skills-for-learning/tutorial
npx skills add iannbing/skills-for-learning/guide

Manual / local install

Clone the repo and either:

• load as a plugin during development: claude --plugin-dir ./skills-for-learning

• or copy individual skills into your user skills dir:

  mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
  cp -r skills/explain      ~/.claude/skills/
  cp -r skills/walkthrough  ~/.claude/skills/
  cp -r skills/tutorial     ~/.claude/skills/
  cp -r skills/guide        ~/.claude/skills/

  Installed this way the skills have no namespace prefix — they're just /explain, /walkthrough, /tutorial, and /guide.

Usage

explain

/skills-for-learning:explain how does OAuth 2.0 authorization code flow work

Produces:

1. High-Level — 3–7 bullets plus an ASCII flow diagram.
2. Break-Down — components, lifecycles, sequence diagrams. Real code snippets when explaining code.
3. Glossary — domain-specific terms only (no API, HTTP, DNS filler).

Calibrated for a junior engineer — the glossary skips general-computing basics and covers only terms specific to the topic.

walkthrough

/skills-for-learning:walkthrough PR #482
/skills-for-learning:walkthrough src/auth/session.ts
/skills-for-learning:walkthrough why we moved from Redux to Zustand

Produces a markdown document at <git-repo-root>/personal/walkthrough-<slug>.md that:

• drops the reader into the codebase as a new engineer would find it
• names the problems precisely before proposing solutions
• walks through 3–4 realistic alternatives and why each fails with a specific technical reason
• ends with a graded Final Verdict (A+ / A / B / C / D / F) with evidence-backed suggestions

Add personal/walkthrough-*.md to your .gitignore — these are personal study notes.

tutorial

Run inside an empty directory where you want the learning repo to live.

/skills-for-learning:tutorial GraphQL
/skills-for-learning:tutorial teach me Kubernetes, intermediate level
/skills-for-learning:tutorial React Testing Library

Generates learn-<topic>/ containing:

• theory/ — three markdown files: core concepts (with Mermaid diagrams), controversies & gotchas, and a 10-question expert quiz
• practice/<project>/ — a minimal scaffold plus a milestone-based README with ordered TODOs you check off as you build
• .guide/learner-profile.md — tracks weak points across sessions; feeds follow-up tutorials

If a learner-profile.md already exists when you generate a new tutorial, the next tutorial will target your recorded weak points.

guide

Used inside a tutorial repo, when you start working on a practice milestone.

/skills-for-learning:guide I'm starting milestone 2
/skills-for-learning:guide I'm stuck on step 3.1
/skills-for-learning:guide here's my code, what do you think? [paste]

Coaching behaviour:

• You drive. The skill does not write code for you unless you explicitly say "show me".
• Escalating hints — reframe → narrow → point → demonstrate → explain. You never hit a dead end, but you also don't get spoonfed.
• Logs every struggle and conceptual mistake to .guide/learner-profile.md, so follow-up tutorials from the tutorial skill can target your weak spots.
• Marks steps done in the practice README as you complete them.

Why these four?

Two complementary loops:

• Understand what exists — explain decomposes any concept into a reliably-structured form; walkthrough teaches the why behind a specific design decision.
• Learn what's new — tutorial generates a learning repo from scratch; guide coaches you through the practice without giving away the answer.

Each skill encodes the shape of its output so Claude produces consistent, well-organised results every time instead of drifting into walls of text.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

Contributing

Issues and PRs welcome at https://github.com/iannbing/skills-for-learning.