A Claude Code skill
A tutor that knows where you are, and gets sharper every time you show up.
Point it at anything you want to understand. Most AI tutoring starts over every session; primer keeps a learner model in your own git repo — what you have demonstrated, what it merely assumed, and how far each has decayed — and calibrates every lesson against it.
New here? It is a short walkthrough of why it exists and how it works.
# Elicit — before anything new Last week you said an unconformity was "a gap in the rock." Want to sharpen that? > it's a missing layer, right? something eroded away Close. Here is the contact, with the gap blanked. rock record │██████████████ ███████████│ sandstone, shale missing time │░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░│ ? └0 120 Myr The contact is one surface you could put a finger on. How much time is missing at it? Commit before I show you.
The intake interview discovers what you already know and decomposes the goal you came in with. There is no built-in curriculum to fit into, so the subject is yours to choose.
/primer plate tectonics
/primer how cats regulate body heat
/primer orbital resonance
/primer combat math for my RPG
/primer Italian subjunctive
/primer consistent hashing
/primer wine fermentation
/primer counterpoint
The figure above is from a geology lesson. The same diagram forms draw a protocol handshake, a stellar lifecycle, or an initiative order — because they describe shapes of ideas, not a field.
In Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is a book that notices who's reading it and reshapes itself to fit. It meets its reader where she is and grows alongside her, never pitched over her head or beneath it.
Anyone reading this has more of the world's knowledge within reach than any scholar in history. What almost nobody has is someone to teach them it — a tutor who knows what you already understand, notices when you're bluffing, and is still there next year. That used to be something you bought with money, or went without.
Most of us were schooled for a while. Being educated is a longer project, and nobody hands you the tutor for it. primer was prompted by one narrow problem, staying current in a field that keeps moving. It is driven by a much less narrow one: wanting to know how mountains get made, and what counterpoint is, and why the cat does that.
A book that will teach anyone anything, patiently, for as long as they stay curious, was fiction when Stephenson wrote it. It isn't fiction now.
Each of these is a constraint the engine enforces in code, rather than an aspiration in a README.
Depth markers carry confidence and evidence. primer distinguishes what it has watched you do from what it inferred, and decays both over time. It will not hand you a certain-looking guess about yourself.
Diagrams arrive with the causal step blanked. You commit to an answer before the reveal is reachable. Generating an idea beats being handed one, so the page will not let you be handed one.
Every lesson runs a source-discovery pass and records its verdicts. The built-in canon is a vetted floor rather than a ceiling, so knowledge doesn't freeze on the day someone wrote a list.
Your profile and your lessons live only in your own private repo. The public engine holds zero personal data, and the skill never goes digging through your own files.
Paste this into a Claude Code session. It will check what you already have, install the rest, and walk you through the parts that need you. You don’t need git, a GitHub account, or any of this explained first.
Read https://voidnologo.com/primer/agent-setup.md and follow it to set up primer on this machine. Walk me through anything you need from me.
That points it at agent-setup.md, a plain-language runbook you can read yourself first.
Clone the engine and install it as a skill.
git clone https://github.com/voidnologo/primer ~/primer cd ~/primer && ./tools/install.sh
Create your private learning folder. Everything primer learns about you lives here and nowhere else.
~/primer/tools/init-instance.sh
Restart Claude Code so it picks up the new skill, then run the intake interview.
/primer init
Learn something.
/primer plate tectonics
/primer nextwhat to learn next/primer reviewspaced-retrieval warm-up/primer viewopen a lesson’s figures/primer indexyour topic map, with status/primer recalibratedeep profile review/primer updateengine + instance, one step