bowen31337

Comprehension Ladder — Design skill for Claude Code

Design community

Claude Code skill that explains anything on Karpathy's comprehension ladder: ASD-STE100 prose (80% strictness), blueprint SVG diagrams, interactive HTML explainers, and narrated 3Blue1Brown-style vide.

How to install Comprehension Ladder

This entry records only its repository, not the path inside it, so there is no exact command to give. Open bowen31337/comprehension-ladder and copy the folder into ~/.claude/skills/, or the file into ~/.claude/agents/.

What Comprehension Ladder does

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README

comprehension-ladder

**A Claude Code skill that explains anything so a human can understand it: as Simplified Technical English prose, a blueprint diagram, an interactive HTML page, or a narrated 3Blue1Brown-style video.**

LLMs now do most of the legwork. The human job moves up to oversight and understanding. This skill does the understanding part well. It turns a concept, a diff, a design doc, an incident note or an LLM's wall of text into the format that is easiest to absorb, and it never adds facts or drops hedges along the way.

The idea comes from [Andrej Karpathy's post of 2 October 2026](https://x.com/karpathy/status/2105819303471976479). It describes a ladder of output formats, where each rung is usually easier to absorb than the one below it.

The ladder

Rung	Output	Good for
1. STE prose	Markdown in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English, with a strictness setting (default "80% of the way to STE100")	Short explanations, diffs, answers you will re-read
2. Diagram	One self-contained SVG in a blueprint "overview sheet" style: lettered panels, title block, grid reference	Structure, data flow, sequences, incidents
3. Web page	One offline-capable interactive HTML file that runs the real computation	Anything with a parameter, a process over time, or a "what if"
4. Explainer video	Narrated MP4: STE narration + TTS + animation, rendered with Manim or the bundled `frames.py` renderer	Topics with a story that changes over time

Each reply ends with one line that offers the next rung up, e.g. `Next: diagram (2) · HTML (3) · video (4)`.

What makes it different from "just ask the model"

Same facts on every rung. The skill writes an internal outline first (claims, mechanism, hedges, one example). Every format renders that outline, so climbing the ladder changes the form, never the facts.
Hedges survive. "May be caused by a race condition" stays