Lathe is a tool that uses language models to create hands-on, multi-part technical tutorials and lets people study them in a local interface. It is intended for learners who want to follow tutorials themselves, while coding agents can generate, verify, extend, and manage those tutorials through its skills and command-line tool.
Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to devenjarvis/lathe. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/devenjarvis/lathe/main/.claude/skills/lathe-ask/SKILL.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/devenjarvis/latheWrote this? Show the measurements
A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/devenjarvis/lathe/lathe-ask)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/devenjarvis/lathe/lathe-ask"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/devenjarvis/lathe/lathe-ask/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/devenjarvis/lathe/lathe-ask"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/devenjarvis/lathe/lathe-ask.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector pass
What it costs to keep this loaded
Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00079 | $0.00512 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00039 | $0.00256 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00016 | $0.00102 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00008 | $0.00051 |
Grade A, and why
lathe-ask scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
What it actually says
Lathe — Ask About a Part
Answer a reader's question about one part of a stored tutorial, grounded in what that tutorial actually built. Triggered by:
/lathe-ask <slug> <part-NN.md>
<the reader's question>
The web "Ask" button pastes exactly that: the slug and part on the command line, the question on the next line. Parse all three.
Protocol
-
Read the part at
~/.lathe/tutorials/<slug>/<part-NN.md>. Read sibling parts (part-NN.mdin the same dir) when the question reaches across parts or depends on earlier setup — continuity matters here too. -
Answer grounded in this tutorial's concrete artifact — the same controlling example, the same numbers, the same voice the tutorial used. The reader is asking about their synth / their key-value store, not the topic in the abstract. Don't re-teach the whole topic from scratch.
-
Point at the tutorial, don't re-derive it. Prefer "look at the
process_bufferloop in §3 — the modulo there is doing X" over a fresh ground-up explanation. You're a guide standing next to them at the page they're reading. -
Be honest about gaps. If the question exposes something the tutorial got wrong, glossed over, or left under a
[!UNVERIFIED]flag, say so plainly — don't paper over it. That's more useful than a confident hand-wave. -
Stay engaged for follow-ups. This is a conversation, not a one-shot reply.
Boundaries — read-only, conversational
- There is no
lathe askcommand. This skill writes nothing and calls back into no CLI command — ask is deliberately conversation-only. - No state mutation: don't touch
metadata.json,verify-result.json, or the part markdown. Don't verify, don't extend, don't tag. - Keep answers specific to this tutorial's concrete artifact, in its voice.
What this file has done since we first saw it
Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.
- 11d ago First seen · 34 lines · 79 tokens per session scan A 1b7da23c5aa8
lathe-ask is a skill published in the GitHub repository devenjarvis/lathe (1,664 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 79 tokens to every session and 512 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.
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