Study Coach · the `/ask-coach` command

ai-study-kit has many features — quiz app, courses, flashcards, wrong-question grilling, podcasts, deployment — which itself becomes a burden for a learner: what exactly should I do today? /ask-coach answers that. It’s the repo’s built-in main-entry skill: install it once, start every study session from it, and let it scan your state, recommend, and execute with you — no need to memorize the toolchain.

The command names are the menu — the ai-study-kit plugin (name is permanent) installs five commands: /ask-coach is the main entry (state snapshot + recommendation + guided execution; everything else routes from here), plus four direct-entry thin commands — /study-coach coached tutoring (F10), /study-doctor one-stop health check, /study-recap wrong-question deep-dive (F4), /study-podcast podcast (F5). The full command surface and intent-routing table live in skills/ask-coach/SKILL.md.

Installation

Once it’s installed, day-to-day studying needs only the five commands — the /ask-coach main entry plus the four direct-entry /study-* commands, all typed in the chat; just say what you want to learn. The pnpm commands below are setup/contributor operations, touched once during install (or run by your agent for you) — daily studying never needs them, and there’s nothing to memorize.

The skill sources live in the repo under skills/ (single source of truth: the ask-coach main entry + four thin commands study-coach / study-doctor / study-recap / study-podcast that share the main entry’s references/). Two install paths:

① Plugin marketplace (zcode / Claude Code, recommended): the repo ships its own marketplace manifest (.claude-plugin/marketplace.json; scripts/sync-plugin.mjs generates plugins/ai-study-kit/ from the source). Add the marketplace https://github.com/jerryjiao/ai-study-kit in your client and install the ai-study-kit plugin — skill updates arrive with marketplace refreshes, no manual reinstall (versions follow repo releases). After a plugin update, opening /ask-coach in an older project reports the version gap and guides you through the F13 upgrade (data-safe, fills the gaps — see F13; the kit snapshot self-reports its version via kit-version.json). The plugin name is ai-study-kit for life; the commands are the ask-coach family (renamed from /ai-study-kit in v0.13, Sept 2026 — marketplace names are permanent, so the plugin name stays).

② Manual install (any client honoring ~/.agents/skills/):

# from the ai-study-kit repo root (installs all five skills; thin commands rely on the main entry's references/)
pnpm run skill:install          # copies to ~/.agents/skills/{ask-coach,study-coach,study-doctor,study-recap,study-podcast}
pnpm run skill:install -- --link   # symlink variant (auto-updates with git pull)

# other clients: custom destination
bash scripts/install-skill.sh --dest ~/.claude/skills

# uninstall
pnpm run skill:uninstall

After installing, restart the CLI (or open a new session) and type /ask-coach. It also works uninstalled: just tell your agent to read skills/ask-coach/SKILL.md and follow it.

How it works

Every invocation runs the same three steps:

Scan state (read-only, ≤1 min) — theme, question/card/course/deep-dive inventory, answering progress, ungraduated wrong questions, due flashcards, lessons completed, weak oral-recitation targets (derived from the attempts ledger), tutoring sessions and exam deadline, AI config, backend online or not, kit version drift (your project vs the plugin snapshot — lagging or unknown version leads to the F13 upgrade, see below); with a knowledge graph location provided it also carries graph signals (per-node mastery four-states, prerequisite relations — see F12).
Report + recommend — one snapshot table + one recommended action with a reason + a numbered menu.
Execute with you — once you pick, it follows that flow’s playbook in skills/ask-coach/references/ step by step, then checks the “done” criteria.

Without an explicit intent, the recommendation takes the first hit in order: environment checks (version drift) sit ahead of the study entries — align the feature layer first; your data is never at risk. The study-side head runs “flashcards → spaced retest → sprint → resume tutoring”: reviews are debt that accrues daily (due flashcards refresh memory; the spaced retest re-verifies what you got wrong last time — folded into the tutoring opening slot at a tiny budget), the sprint is the harvest window within a week of the exam, and tutoring can resume anytime. The full 13-condition list with the per-row rationale is in the “recommendation algorithm” section of skills/ask-coach/SKILL.md.

The thirteen flows

The thirteen flows group into four lines, numbered as the menu: teaching F10 coached tutoring · F11 pre-deadline sprint · F12 knowledge-graph projection; exam prep F3 daily study · F4 wrong-question grilling · F5 make a podcast; content F2 new theme · F6 generate/extend course · F7 edit content; ops F1 bootstrap · F13 upgrade · F8 verify & release · F9 deploy. Each flow’s playbook (purpose / prerequisites / steps / done criteria) lives in skills/ask-coach/references/ — that directory is the single source of truth for F1–F13 details; this page only gives the overview.

Plus two ops entries: health check (/study-doctor — one-stop orchestration of the four quality gates + environment probes, with a pass/fail report and fix order) and diagnostics (progress not syncing, course 404, CLI config errors, scan hits… a symptom → root cause → action lookup table).

Design notes

A routing skill, not another CLI: it introduces no new runtime — it encodes “read state → recommend → run existing commands/flows” as agent-followable instructions. All underlying capabilities already exist in the repo (three AI CLIs, sync scripts, verification gates).
State before advice: the coach is forbidden from recommending on vibes — every snapshot field has a probe command (skills/references/state.md), and progress statistics match apps/quiz-app/src/lib/progress.ts exactly (tombstone filtering, random-sandbox exclusion, wrong-graduation thresholds, SRS due).
Methodology embedded: the recommendation order is methodology.en.md “syllabus → materials → quizzes” made executable; the F2 flow forces MISSION (with the exam-point table) / RESOURCES before any course or question generation — authoring isn’t free-form JSON writing, it’s point-by-point production against the table, closed out by three green gates (qa / scan / four-alignment).

Extending

To add a flow: add a section (purpose / prerequisites / steps / done criteria) in the flow playbooks under skills/ask-coach/references/, plus a row in SKILL.md’s menu and intent-routing table. Then run pnpm run sync:plugin to regenerate the plugin artifacts (manual-install users additionally rerun pnpm run skill:install). To add a thin command: create a new directory under skills/ with a thin SKILL.md (~15 lines, sharing ../ask-coach/references/) — sync-plugin picks it up automatically.

FAQ

Q: Is installing it mandatory? A: No — but then you have to figure out “what next” yourself every time. Installed, it’s a one-sentence entry point.

Q: Will it touch my data? A: Steps 1/2 are strictly read-only. Step 3 writes files / runs commands only for the flow you pick, and the playbooks flag the red lines (sync artifacts are hand-edit-forbidden, progress files are hand-edit-forbidden).

Q: Does it survive switching AI CLIs? A: Yes. The skill is markdown instructions + reference docs; any client supporting the skills-directory convention can install it (--dest to point it there).