/Explain

name: Explain
evals:
  manual:
    reason: "the skill succeeds only when the principal can explain or apply what was taught, and that shows in his own answers"
    falsifier: "after a lesson, an explanation or a quiz, the principal cannot answer an application question on the material, or a quiz verdict disagrees with the live source"
metadata:
  short-description: "Keeps the principal current on the fundamentals of his projects, work and infrastructure: spoken lessons, deep explanations and quizzes."
version: 2.0.2
description: Keeps the principal current on the fundamentals of what is going on in the principal's projects, work and technical infrastructure: spoken interactive lessons on the conversation topic, deep explanations of an area's fundamentals read fresh from live sources, and quizzes that remember what the principal missed. USE WHEN teach me, /tm, /teach-me, tutorial, teach me this, walk me through this interactively, learn mode, quiz me, help me actually understand what we just did, explain fundamentals, /ef, what are the fundamentals of, how does this project actually work, catch me up on, refresh me on, quiz fundamentals, /qf, quiz me on the fundamentals, test what I know about, am I still current on. NOT FOR elaborating my last answer (the elaborate shortcut), the LifeOS core pitch (lc), story explanations of content (StoryExplanation), designed visual maps (Visualize), discovery interviews on a half-formed idea (/discuss).

Explain

Keeps the principal up on the fundamentals of what is going on across the principal's projects, work and technical infrastructure, deeply and thoroughly. The principal lives inside many systems at once and cannot hold all of them in mind, so this skill teaches the topic in front of them, explains the parts of any area that it cannot lose, and quizzes the principal so gaps show up before they cost anything. It absorbed the Teach skill on 2026-10-16, when the principal asked for these intents and for any existing teaching skill to be merged in rather than duplicated.

Ideal State

• The principal leaves each session able to explain or apply the material, shown by the principal's own answers, not by how much was printed.
• What he is told about a project, area or piece of infra is true of it today: read this session from the live source, never recalled.
• Over time the skill knows where his understanding is thin, because every quiz answer is on the record, and each new quiz goes after the misses and whatever changed since he was last tested.

Intent Routing

| Intent | Trigger | File | |--------|---------|------| | **Teach** | "teach me", "/tm", "/teach-me", "tutorial", "quiz me" on what we just covered | `Intents/Teach.md` | | **ExplainFundamentals** | "/ef", "explain the fundamentals of", "catch me up on", "how does X actually work" | `Intents/ExplainFundamentals.md` | | **QuizFundamentals** | "/qf", "quiz me on the fundamentals of", "test what I know about", "am I still current on" | `Intents/QuizFundamentals.md` |

| File | Read when | |------|-----------| | `Setup.md` | first-time setup: the voice server and Fish key the spoken narration needs, and a read-only check |

Teach works on the conversation topic as a spoken dialogue. ExplainFundamentals and QuizFundamentals work on a standing area (a project, a work stream, a system) whether or not we touched it this session, and share one set of fundamentals per area so the quiz tests what the explanation taught.

Gotchas

• **"Quiz me" means two things.** Right after a lesson or a piece of work, it is Teach's quiz protocol on that material. Naming an area ("quiz me on the billing service", "/qf the network") is QuizFundamentals, which reads the live source and the record of past answers.
• **The `e` shortcut is not this skill.** It explains my last answer more, and more simply; `/ef` explains an area's fundamentals.

Examples

**Example 1: Teach the thing we just built**

User: "teach me" (after a session debugging DNS records)
→ Teach intent
→ Spoken intro, a concept map of 3-5 ideas, one beat and one question per turn
→ Ends with a 2-3 question quiz and a recap diagram

**Example 2: Explain an area's fundamentals**

User: "/ef billing service"
→ ExplainFundamentals intent
→ Reads its projects-table row, the project ISA and its code layout this session
→ The fundamentals by the "without X it can no longer ___" test, each with what it connects to, one flow diagram, what changed lately

**Example 3: Quiz on fundamentals**

User: "/qf home network"
→ QuizFundamentals intent
→ Reads the live sources and the learning record, asks 5 application questions one per turn, weighted to past misses
→ Each answer gets a verdict against the source and is appended to the STATVS learning stream