Prologue: BYO(build-your-own) Tutor
The digital world is moving forward at breakneck speed. So fast even, that it's hard to be sure if you know what you think you've learned, and harder still to get clarification through the fog of progress. I found myself wanting to learn about so many things without the time or ability to stop and really conceptualize what it was I was learning at all without missing the next lesson. This is when I decided to use modern tools to solve my modern problem.
With a little help from a friend
I'd recently installed Claude in my terminal and had tried a few interesting things. For want of a knowledgeable, Socratic tutor to help me find my own answers, I built an agentic facsimile of a tutoring space in the Library of Alexandria with Socrates (as Claude knows Socrates to be, at least) and, though there were notable breakthroughs in that process, I felt limited, needing to pull up a new agent and prepare myself for a deep dive when sometimes a few nudges in the right direction would do the job (and use far fewer tokens). The question became: How can I find a way to study these things while utilizing the expertise of a post-deep-search Claude without needing to do it sitting at my screen. How can I get these concepts delivered to me in a way that I can understand them inside and out, in a way that puts me in the positions to ask the best questions when there are the questions to be asked. Then it struck me like a low-hanging bar: You're using an LLM, dummy. Just have it write you a paper.
