Ask HN: Anyone using AI agents for active learning sprints? Here's my setup

4 points by bhagyeshsp 9 hours ago | 2 comments

Hi HN,

I'm a big fan of AI's ability to provide personalized tutoring.

So, lately, I have been using my Antigravity IDE (you can use any agentic harness) for personal learning. Things that bubble up during my daily work or just things I want to learn.

---

*Setup*

  learning/
  ├── AGENT.md
  ├── CURRENT.md
  ├── linux-admin/
  │   └── README.md
  ├── mcp/
  │   └── README.md
  ├── micro-gpt/
  │   └── README.md
  ├── postgresql/
  │   ├── PROGRESS.md
  │   └── README.md
  └── rag-v2/
      └── README.md

- AGENT.md: agent's role, my learning preferences and goals, instructions about different chores: sequence of files to explore and log things to

- CURRENT.md: current topic's directory path

- README.md: topic's learning goals, concepts I want to master

- PROGRESS.md: generated and edited by the agent on the fly

---

This is ACTIVE learning. As opposed to what Karpathy's LLM Wiki or any personal knowledge base does.

The learner undergoes 15-20 minutes learning sprints, tries things hands-on, asks to take notes, goes down the rabbit hole and agent tutor keeps the learning contextual and personal.

I have had an excellent experience with this setup so far.

Anyone doing this or anything similar?

▲ blackbrokkoli 8 hours ago | parent [-]

what is your hook into such a sprint; how do you get started? Do you just prompt "so uh teach me something about linux admin" and go from there?

I think this has been my biggest hurdle with LLM-based learning, even though I think the concept may be quite powerful...

Happy to hear more about your approach :)

▲ bhagyeshsp 5 hours ago | parent [-]

On the same lines: "hi, let's get started" and it begins understanding my setup and as per the initialization protocol, it has the latest state:

This is the main hook in AGENT.md file:

   ## 3. Initialization Protocol (Read This First)

   Upon being activated in this directory, you MUST:

   1. **Read `CURRENT.md`** to understand the current topic under study. The current topic's content and files are under its dedicated directory. **Ignore** all other topic directories.

   2. **Read the topic-specific `README.md`**: (e.g., in `/mcp/`) to understand the specific mental models and technical constraints of the current subject.

   3. **Read `PROGRESS.md`**: To understand exactly where the last session ended and what the "Current Frontier" is.

   4. **Acknowledge State**: Start the session by briefly confirming the current learning milestone you've identified from the files.

Since the agent makes live notes inside PROGRESS.md, no matter where you left off, it is all taken care of every time you start afresh.

Mostly, the agent concludes the session once it guages that 15-20 minute sprint-worthy concepts have been covered. Try it. If you want, I can share the full notes sans-my personal info through gist.