Hi all!

I'm so excited to finally launch my personal project, Shikhu.

I'm Arjun, and I'm currently a senior developer advocate at Pinecone. My job is to help teach developers how to use and apply AI, and I love learning and using coding agents. However, I've felt a significant shift in my ability to understand what my code does. And to be honest, it sucks!

People have referred to this as many things: comprehension debt, cognitive surrender, skill atrophy. And it's clear that as we make more and more code, it puts more pressure on code review and on the real people who are accountable for what the code does. Whatever it is, it doesn't feel good, and I wanted to do something about it.

Shikhu is my attempt at bringing a bit of learning back to code, without totally hamstringing the agentic coding process. It's great for solo devs, people learning to upskill, open source repos wanting to establish standards of knowledge, and generally teams who wanna put the learning back in coding.

How it works

Install Shikhu, then start a session with your agent.

While you build, you ask your agent questions about your code, like you already do, and Shikhu quietly saves them. It can even find the questions you've already asked in your past Claude Code chats.

Shikhu turns those questions into short quizzes on your own codebase. Get one right and it becomes a "golden" question, and Shikhu tracks which files you actually understand: your knowledge coverage. Think test coverage, but for your brain. There's also an optional git hook that checks you've learned what your branch changed before you push.

I built Shikhu with Shikhu: every PR this week went through its own push hook, and it only added a few minutes to each one.

Under the hood, Shikhu uses Jev from TypeSafe to figure out which questions are about your code and which files answer them, and Inception's Mercury to write the quizzes.

Try it in a minute

Grab the repo here: https://github.com/arjunpatel7/shikhu. It's free and open source (MIT). You'll need Python 3.12+, an OpenRouter API key, and a codebase to try it on. By the way, do this inside your agent after init, so the accompanying skills from shikhu can help you learn.

uv tool install shikhu   # installs Shikhu
cd your-repo

shikhu init    # saves your OpenRouter key once, installs skills for your agent,

shikhu summarize              # a short summary of each file, so Shikhu knows what a question is about

shikhu map                    # finds questions you already asked in past Claude Code chats, picks a file

shikhu generate-from-study <file>   # turns those questions into quiz questions on that file

shikhu quiz                   # answer them right in your terminal

No Claude Code history yet? Skip steps 4 and 5: just ask your agent a question about your code, then run shikhu quiz. A first run costs about a cent.

During Hypership, I'm looking for feature requests! Each request merged gives my launch extra points, so please consider making a request below! Here are some ideas, but feel free to ask or comment anything, and I'll be on standby all day to build!

Explain why after a wrong answer
A visual coverage view in the terminal that's shareable
More languages out of the box
shikhu support for Cursor and Codex
Knowledge coverage as a GitHub PR check
Share your codebase's questions with your team
Benchmark your coding agent with your golden questions

I'd also love your feedback after you try it. Thank you!

One final shoutout to @Jev @Typesafe @Imbue @Claude Code OpenRouter @Paper and many more tools that made Shikhu possible. Thank you!!

If you've made it this far, consider signing up for my newsletter, Answering Machines. There, you can keep in touch about Shikhu and future developments too:

Sign up here: https://buttondown.com/answeringmachines?tag=shikhu-fan

Sincerely,
Arjun