The /teach Skill

Quickstart:

npx skills add mattpocock/skills --skill=teach

npx skills update teach

Source

What it does

teach turns the current directory into a standing teaching workspace and teaches you one topic across many sessions — devising short, beautiful, interactive lessons tied to why you want to learn.

It does not teach from the model's own memory. Parametric knowledge is treated as untrusted; before it can teach, it gathers high-trust resources and grounds every claim in a citation. And it is stateful — the workspace remembers what you've learned, so each session picks up where the last left off rather than starting from scratch.

When to reach for it

You invoke this by typing /teach — the agent won't reach for it on its own.

Reach for it when you want to learn a topic over time — a language, a framework, yoga, theoretical physics — and want the sessions to accumulate rather than evaporate. It is not for a one-off explanation; if you just need something clarified in the moment, ask directly. Reach for teach when the learning is a project.

Prerequisites

teach builds a whole directory in place, so run it somewhere you're happy to keep as a dedicated workspace. Over time it writes:

• MISSION.md — the reason you're learning this, which grounds everything else. If it's empty, teach's first job is to question you until it isn't.
• RESOURCES.md — the vetted, high-trust sources it teaches from.
• ./lessons/*.html — the numbered, self-contained lessons (the primary unit of teaching).
• ./reference/*.html — compressed cheat-sheets, algorithms, glossaries you'll return to.
• ./learning-records/*.md — what you've learned, ADR-style, used to judge what to teach next.
• ./assets/* — reusable components (a shared stylesheet first) so the lessons look like one course.
• NOTES.md — your teaching preferences.

Mission, and the zone of proximal development

Every lesson hangs off the mission. Without it, knowledge has nothing to attach to and lessons feel abstract — so the mission is the first thing teach pins down and keeps updating as you grow. From the mission and your learning records it computes your zone of proximal development: the next lesson should challenge you just enough, no more.

Storage strength, not fluency

The word to think with is storage strength — long-term retention — as opposed to fluency, the in-the-moment recall that feels like mastery but isn't. teach deliberately builds the former through desirable difficulty: retrieval practice, spacing, and interleaving. Knowledge is taught first (where difficulty is the enemy), then skills are drilled through a tight feedback loop (where difficulty is the tool).

Where it fits

teach is a reach-for-it-anytime standalone — a long-running learning project you drive session by session, not a step in a build chain. It shares no workflow with the other productivity skills; it simply owns its workspace directory and lives there. When you're unsure which skill or flow fits, ask-matt routes you.