I like learning new things, and I’m bad at remembering them. Learn is my attempt to fix that: a quiet, private app that works like a patient tutor and a personal textbook in one. It’s deployed, I use it, and it’s for me first.

It isn’t a chatbot with a lesson bolted on, a course factory or a game with streaks. There’s no pressure and nobody to impress. A local model does the thinking on my own hardware, so what I study stays with me.

What’s in it

• Home. One prompt for whatever I’m curious about, and one clear thing to continue with. No wall of options.
• Missions. A longer goal, like getting comfortable with some piece of infrastructure. I can have several at once. If I switch to something else for three weeks, the first mission is paused, not reset, and picks up with a short refresher.
• Tutor. A helper that sits next to the lesson instead of replacing it. It explains first, asks a question only when that helps, and adjusts to my energy: a quick five minutes, a normal session, or a deep dive.
• Teach-back. The tutor flips and plays a curious student, so I have to explain the idea myself. It’s a good way to find out what I don’t really understand yet.
• Playgrounds. Disposable sandboxes where I can break real systems on purpose and learn from what happens, safely walled off from everything else.
• Orbit. One of the interactive explainers. It’s Newton’s cannon: fire a cannonball from a mountain, change the height and speed, and watch it crash, fall into orbit, or escape. The numbers are exact and repeatable, so it’s a real model of orbits and not a cartoon.
• Review. Spaced questions that bring things back just before I’d forget, with questions about understanding and not just recall.
• Journey and Library. A transparent “why this now?” for what comes next, and a library of lessons, notes and sources I’ve saved.

Why I built it

Most learning tools are built around content. This one is built around me: what I know, what I keep getting wrong, and what I’m curious about this week. The progress is honest about uncertainty instead of showing a fake mastery percentage.

It keeps improving as I use it. If you’re building something similar, or have thoughts on making learning stick, I’d like to hear them.