Whetstone
A whetstone sharpens a blade. Blades don't get sharp by soaking in oil.
"I just love the feeling of knowledge flowing naturally into my brain." — said every clueless waste of a learner
Why does everyone now believe they can actually learn from a short video? Lectures at 2x speed, papers "read" via a 100-word AI summary, agents driven with nothing but "continue", "it errored", "just give me something that runs". Somewhere along the way we forgot that learning is supposed to be a scourging of the soul, a grinding of the mind, a mortification of the flesh. If you want effortless, why not sleep on the textbook and absorb it by osmosis? :)
This is the most user-hostile learning tool there is. Unless you also want to be Sisyphus pushing the boulder with me, I don't recommend it to anyone.
This is the short English version. The full documentation is in Chinese: 中文说明 →. The skills teach in Chinese.
What it is
A learning tool that runs inside Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex, DeepSeek Harness or pi. Give it a book, a document or a codebase; it rearranges the material into a problem → solution → new problem path and then, section by section, makes you:
- predict the solution before reading it;
- close the material and explain the section in your own words;
- rate your confidence before answering, so feedback can start with "confident but wrong";
- answer a follow-up aimed at the weakest point of your actual answer;
- on your next session, answer a variant question first to check what survived.
Decades of learning science point the same way: methods that make learning feel easy mostly hurt long-term retention; methods that make recall harder mostly strengthen it. Retrieval practice g ≈ 0.5–0.6, self-explanation g ≈ 0.55, rereading near zero (sources in docs/evidence.md). This tool sits on the effortful side.
Two things it deliberately withholds:
- The top two of the four layers. Fact and mechanism go into the lesson text. Rationale and principle — why it was designed this way, what the transferable idea is — are never shown; they only generate questions and judge how deep your answer went. An essence, once summarised for you, is just another thing to memorise.
- Your own learning log. Every attempt is appended, never edited, never shown. With the optional store, your past wrong claims come back anonymised for you to critique.
Install
One skill directory, five hosts:
| Host | Install | Invoke |
|---|
| Claude Code | claude plugin marketplace add /path/to/whetstone-ai && claude plugin install whetstone@whetstone-ai, or ad hoc claude --plugin-dir ./plugin | /whetstone:learn … |
| Claude Desktop | download whetstone-<version>.plugin from a release (or build it with python3 package_release.py) and upload it in the plugin manager. Or ./install_skills.sh ~/.claude/skills | /learn … |
| DeepSeek Harness | ./install_skills.sh ~/.agents/skills, then restart npx @deepseek-ai/dsh web | /learn … |
| pi | pi install git:github.com/Vico304/whetstone-ai (or a local checkout: pi install /path/to/whetstone-ai, or ./install_skills.sh ~/.pi/agent/skills) | /skill:learn … |
| Codex | install plugin/ as a plugin | $learn … |
Type / and you should see guide / outline / map / learn / clarify. Everything the tool writes goes under whetstone/ inside your materials directory; the materials themselves are never modified.
The five skills
| Skill | What it does |
|---|
| learn | Main entry. Fills in whatever is missing (your profile, a survey of the materials, a course-by-course plan, this course's outline), then generates one lesson document per section, checks prerequisites and tutors section by section |
| guide | Wizard. Asks whether you want a tour or a plan; planning records your background and goals, surveys a directory of materials, and confirms the course sequence one course at a time. Plans only |
| outline | Generate, discuss or revise one course's outline; writes it back after you confirm |
| map | Builds or revises a course's system map — parts, what contains what, labelled links — and turns a section into one that places the parts or follows one run; writes back on confirmation |
| clarify | Groups the [[wikilinks]] you leave in the lesson documents by unit and writes one source-grounded note per unit: a single unclear concept is just explained, several in one unit get the unit re-taught from them (Obsidian-compatible) |
Two choices are made while planning: full or fast (fast narrows the scope and relaxes judging, but still predicts before revealing); by material or by domain (by domain starts with a skeleton course of basic principles, with your materials as examples, and you pick branches to go deeper afterwards).
Status
1.0, in daily use. The knowledge store is optional and has no long-term usage data yet.
cd plugin && python3 -m unittest discover -s tests
Standard-library Python only, no third-party dependencies.
License
Apache-2.0
