I gotta get a blog post out to satisfy my Beeminder goal. The goal is to fire at noon, but I really need to finish by 11 am PDT because the feed only updates every so often. I just went for a run, and that gets the ideas flowing. I was audio-journaling while running. I’m thinking about A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer and how to build it. I think about that a lot. It’s my Ancient Rome.
I built System Design Practice, OpenQuizzer, and PageQuizzer with the Primer in the back of my mind. Those first two operate at the course level. PageQuizzer operates at the lesson level or smaller. There’s also the curriculum level. Some curricula are highly predetermined, like medical school or St. John’s. Those would be good early sources for a Primer-style curriculum. There’s also something like MIT OpenCourseWare.
Recently, we had the Claude Code leak. That made me think that what we really need is a tutor harness. We have chat, we have something like Claude Code, and we have something like Cowork. We don’t, as far as I know, have an interactive tutor harness yet.
You can use chat as an interactive tutor, but it puts too much on the user. That burden is why we need source material and a structured approach. The harness would be guided by the source material. Maybe you’d have a program-level source, or maybe it would just be at the course-level. It might vary based on the user’s learning goals.
We could have the tutor interview the user to determine what those goals are; it may be that the student doesn’t know. The tutor could also be agile to some extent, figuring out iteratively what works.
Anyway, I’m not sure what is possible with a harness, and it seems like a good thing for me to study. Could we get closer to a tutor using a good harness?
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