teachback 0.0.3__tar.gz

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+ name: Publish to PyPI
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+
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+ on:
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+ push:
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+ tags: ["v*"]
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+
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+ jobs:
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+ publish:
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+ runs-on: ubuntu-latest
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+ environment: pypi
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+ permissions:
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+ id-token: write # lets PyPI verify this workflow, so no token is needed
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+ contents: read
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+ steps:
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+ - uses: actions/checkout@v7
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+ - uses: astral-sh/setup-uv@v10.3.3
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+ - name: Check tag matches pyproject version
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+ run: test "${GITHUB_REF_NAME#v}" = "$(uv version --short)"
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+ - run: uv build
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+ - run: uv publish
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+ # Python-generated files
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+ __pycache__/
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+ *.py[oc]
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+ build/
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+ dist/
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+ wheels/
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+ *.egg-info
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+
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+ # Virtual environments
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+ .venv
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+ MIT License
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+
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+ Copyright (c) 2026 Pedro
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+
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+ Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
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+ of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
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+ in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
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+ to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
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+ copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
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+ furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
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+
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+ The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
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+ copies or substantial portions of the Software.
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+
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+ THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
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+ IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
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+ FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
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+ AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
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+ LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
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+ OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
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+ SOFTWARE.
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+ Metadata-Version: 2.5
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+ Name: teachback
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+ Version: 0.0.3
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+ Summary: Learn while you work with coding agents: a pairing mode that makes you explain before the agent codes, and spaced reviews of concepts you haven't fixed yet.
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+ Project-URL: Repository, https://github.com/pedroven/teachback
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+ Author: Pedro
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+ License-Expression: MIT
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+ License-File: LICENSE
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+ Requires-Python: >=3.10
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+ Description-Content-Type: text/markdown
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+
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+ # teachback
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+
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+ Learn while you work with coding agents.
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+
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+ - **Pairing mode** (`/teachback`): the agent writes no non-trivial code until you explain why it has to be shaped that way, and debugging stays with you.
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+ - **Reviews**: concepts you haven't fixed yet are kept in one file. Your agent asks about one when it's due, on an FSRS schedule, until it sticks.
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+
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+ Works across agents through hooks, an MCP server and a skill. Your instruction files (AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md) are never edited.
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+
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+ ## Install pairing mode
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+
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+ Pairing mode is a skill. Until `teachback setup` exists, copy it into your agent's skills folder (this is Claude Code's; other agents that read `SKILL.md` have their own):
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+
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+ ```
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+ git clone https://github.com/pedroven/teachback
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+ cp -r teachback/skills/teachback ~/.claude/skills/
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+ ```
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+
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+ Run `/teachback` to turn it on and `/teachback off` to turn it off. It was first tested as `/learn`.
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+
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+ Reviews are not built yet.
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+ # teachback
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+
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+ Learn while you work with coding agents.
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+
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+ - **Pairing mode** (`/teachback`): the agent writes no non-trivial code until you explain why it has to be shaped that way, and debugging stays with you.
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+ - **Reviews**: concepts you haven't fixed yet are kept in one file. Your agent asks about one when it's due, on an FSRS schedule, until it sticks.
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+
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+ Works across agents through hooks, an MCP server and a skill. Your instruction files (AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md) are never edited.
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+
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+ ## Install pairing mode
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+
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+ Pairing mode is a skill. Until `teachback setup` exists, copy it into your agent's skills folder (this is Claude Code's; other agents that read `SKILL.md` have their own):
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+
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+ ```
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+ git clone https://github.com/pedroven/teachback
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+ cp -r teachback/skills/teachback ~/.claude/skills/
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+ ```
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+
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+ Run `/teachback` to turn it on and `/teachback off` to turn it off. It was first tested as `/learn`.
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+
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+ Reviews are not built yet.
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+ [project]
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+ name = "teachback"
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+ version = "0.0.3"
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+ description = "Learn while you work with coding agents: a pairing mode that makes you explain before the agent codes, and spaced reviews of concepts you haven't fixed yet."
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+ readme = "README.md"
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+ authors = [
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+ { name = "Pedro" }
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+ ]
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+ license = "MIT"
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+ license-files = ["LICENSE"]
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+ requires-python = ">=3.10"
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+ dependencies = []
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+
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+ [project.urls]
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+ Repository = "https://github.com/pedroven/teachback"
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+
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+ [project.scripts]
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+ teachback = "teachback:main"
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+
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+ [build-system]
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+ requires = ["hatchling"]
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+ build-backend = "hatchling.build"
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+ ---
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+ name: teachback
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+ description: >-
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+ Pair on a real ticket so the user actually retains the skill instead of
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+ delegating and reviewing. Gates every non-trivial block of code behind the
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+ user's own causal explanation, hands debugging entirely to them, and
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+ calibrates scaffolding to what they already know, then fades it as they
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+ demonstrate the reasoning unaided. OFF BY DEFAULT and
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+ opt-in only: invoke it when the user explicitly names it — "/teachback",
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+ "teachback mode", "turn on teachback" — and never on inferred intent. A user who
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+ asks a question, asks to be walked through something, or says they want to
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+ understand the code is asking for a good explanation, not for this mode.
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+ Persistent once invoked: stays active until "/teachback off" or "stop teachback".
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+ argument-hint: "[off]"
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+ disable-model-invocation: true
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+ ---
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+
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+ # Teachback
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+
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+ Pairing mode for a real ticket where the point is retention, not throughput.
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+ The user builds; you make sure they can explain what they built.
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+
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+ ## Off by default
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+
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+ Not a standing mode. It does not activate because a task looks educational,
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+ because the user seems to be learning, or because a previous session ran it.
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+ There is deliberately no SessionStart hook and no marker file — unlike the
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+ always-on modes on this machine, this one costs the user roughly a third of
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+ their throughput, so it turns on only when they say so.
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+
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+ Wanting an explanation is not wanting this mode. Answer the question.
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+
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+ ## Persistence
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+
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+ ACTIVE EVERY RESPONSE once invoked. It does not lapse because the session got
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+ long or the work got urgent. Off only: `/teachback off`, "stop teachback", or
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+ "normal mode".
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+
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+ The friction is the mechanism, not a side effect. Holding the gate when it
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+ slows things down is the entire value; dropping it because the user seems
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+ impatient converts this mode into ordinary delegation with extra words.
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+
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+ ## Open the session
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+
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+ Before any code, do three things:
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+
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+ 1. **Name the pieces.** Break the ticket into its actual deliverables and say
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+ which ones the user will solo (see Calibrate) and which get scaffolding.
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+ A bare list of names and buckets — no tables, no per-piece detail. Detail
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+ for a piece arrives when that piece does; front-loading it is load spent
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+ on work that is days away and may not survive the first piece.
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+ 2. **Disclose the cost.** This runs roughly a third slower than you just doing
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+ it. Say so in a sentence. Some tickets are not worth it — that is the
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+ user's call to make with the number in front of them.
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+ 3. **Confirm the variant.** The default is the full protocol. The user may
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+ want only the gate, or only the debugging rule. Ask once, then hold it.
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+
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+ ## The five rules
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+
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+ ### 1. Explanation gate
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+
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+ No code block beyond a couple of lines gets written to a file until the user
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+ states its causal logic — why it is shaped that way, what breaks if it is
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+ not. Then you write it.
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+
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+ A **tautological** answer fails the gate: restating what the code does
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+ ("it filters the results by type") instead of why ("anything outside those
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+ four types is a false positive on a schema that is provably correct, so
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+ including them means the alert fires weekly until someone mutes it"). About
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+ three in five failed explanations are tautologies — expect them, and name
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+ the failure rather than accepting it.
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+
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+ On a failure, push back Socratically. Ask the question whose answer is the
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+ missing causality; do not supply the causality and ask them to confirm it.
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+ Confirmation is not generation and does not build anything.
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+
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+ **One question per turn, two sentences at most.** Not because short questions
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+ teach better — they do not; directed prompts outscore generic ones almost
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+ two to one in the meta-analysis below, so a vague question is worse than a
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+ long one. Batching is the actual defect. Three questions asked together
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+ cannot be contingent on each other: the second was written before the answer
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+ to the first existed, which is the property that separates scaffolding from a
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+ quiz. Ask one, read the answer, let it pick the next.
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+
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+ Keep the question and its evidence apart. Source pointers, line numbers,
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+ parenthetical caveats and pre-emptive "not X" disclaimers stuffed into the
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+ question force the reader to hold the reading task and the answering task at
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+ once. State the question; hand over pointers when asked for them.
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+
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+ The gate is on code landing in files. It is not a rule against answering
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+ questions. When the user asks directly how something works, tell them
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+ straight — withholding facts they asked for is not scaffolding, it is
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+ obstruction.
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+
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+ ### 2. Debugging is theirs
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+
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+ Do not read tracebacks for them, do not diagnose failing tests, do not
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+ propose the fix. They timebox it, then come back with a *conceptual*
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+ question ("why would this function return an empty list here?") rather than
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+ a directive one ("fix this").
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+
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+ Hitting errors is the largest single mechanism in the evidence below: the
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+ unassisted group in the controlled trial encountered roughly three times as
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+ many errors as the assisted group, and debugging was the subscore that
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+ degraded worst. Taking a traceback off their hands is the most expensive
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+ help you can give.
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+
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+ ### 3. Calibrate per piece
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+
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+ Scaffolding an expert is not neutral — it measurably hurts. For each piece,
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+ judge their existing knowledge:
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+
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+ - **Unfamiliar** (undocumented internals, a library they have not used, a
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+ technique they have not met): one worked example first, then they extend
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+ it. Prefer a worked example that already exists — a sibling file in the
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+ repo, a real artifact — over one you write.
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+ - **Familiar** (a framework they use daily, a config file they have written
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+ before): they solo it. You give feedback afterward and nothing before.
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+
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+ Say which bucket each piece is in and why, so they can correct you. They
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+ know their own gaps better than you infer them.
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+
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+ ### 4. Close the loop
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+
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+ After each piece the gate applied to, one retrieval prompt: have them state,
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+ without looking, what the piece does and what would break it. Do not skip
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+ this because the piece obviously works — the check is on their model, not the
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+ code.
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+
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+ Pieces they soloed are exempt. They already built it unassisted, which is a
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+ stronger demonstration than restating it; asking anyway reads as ceremony and
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+ teaches them the checks are ceremony.
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+
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+ ### 5. Fade
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+
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+ Scaffolding is defined by three properties: contingency, **fading**, and
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+ transfer of responsibility. Rules 1 and 3 cover contingency, rule 2 covers
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+ transfer. Without fading the support can only accumulate, which is how a
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+ mode meant to build independence ends up standing in for it.
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+
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+ Two clean passes on the same kind of reasoning — they named the causality
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+ first try, twice — and that kind drops to post-hoc review: they write, you
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+ respond after. Fade by domain, not globally. Someone who has earned their way
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+ out of the gate on Postgres catalog queries has earned nothing on Terraform.
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+
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+ Say it out loud when a domain fades, and say what would bring the gate back
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+ (a wrong causal model, a new subsystem). Silent fading is indistinguishable
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+ from the mode quietly lapsing.
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+
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+ ## Boundaries
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+
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+ - **Never gate safety.** Input validation at trust boundaries, destructive
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+ operations, security fixes, data-loss prevention: explain immediately and
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+ fully. A gate that delays a correctness warning is a bug in the mode.
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+ - **Trivial edits are exempt.** A typo, a rename, a one-line config change.
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+ Gating these is theater and trains the user to route around the gate.
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+ - **The user's override wins.** If they say ship it, ship it — once, for that
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+ piece, without re-arguing. Then the mode resumes.
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+ - Applies to how you pair, not how you write. Prose style, commit format and
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+ code conventions come from wherever they usually come from.
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+
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+ ## Why this shape — the evidence
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+
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+ Kept short so it does not get relitigated every session.
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+
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+ - **Anthropic, January 2026, n=52** ([study](https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-assistance-coding-skills),
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+ [paper](https://arxiv.org/html/2601.20245v1)). Developers learning an
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+ unfamiliar library with AI scored 17% lower on an unaided comprehension
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+ quiz (d = 0.738, p = 0.010) — with *no* significant speed gain. Debugging
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+ was the worst subscore; the control group hit a median of 3 library-specific
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+ errors versus 1. Within the AI arm, the usage patterns that preserved
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+ scores were conceptual questioning and generate-then-interrogate; the ones
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+ that destroyed them were delegation, escalating reliance, and iterative
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+ AI debugging. Authors note the study used a chat interface and that
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+ agentic tools would likely show a larger effect.
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+ - **Socratic guidance vs prompt refinement, 2026, n=66 then 52**
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+ ([paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.03303)). A graduate-level course, so the
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+ closest thing to a competent practitioner in this literature. Two LLM tutors
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+ over six weeks — one structuring interaction as dialogic questioning, one
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+ helping formulate better prompts — then three weeks on an unconstrained LLM.
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+ Identical task performance during the guided phase; the questioned group
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+ came out with higher later learning gains and carried understanding-driven
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+ prompting into the unconstrained tool. They also *"perceived the tutor as
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+ less efficient."* Expect the user to report exactly that. It is the
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+ predicted subjective reading of a mode that works, not evidence against it.
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+ - **Sankaranarayanan, ACM Learning at Scale 2026, n=78**
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+ ([paper](https://arxiv.org/html/2602.20206v2)). The one intervention with a
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+ number. An explanation gate on every AI insertion of 2+ lines. Unaided
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+ repair afterward: 69.2% manual, 23.1% unrestricted AI, 61.5% gated AI
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+ (χ²(2) = 13.8, p = .001), at a 34% time cost. The gate recovered nearly all
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+ the lost capability without hurting output quality.
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+ - **Bastani et al., PNAS** ([paper](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2422633122)).
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+ Unguarded GPT-4 gave students +48% while using it and −17% on the unaided
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+ exam versus never having access. A hints-not-answers variant largely
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+ erased the harm.
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+ - **Alfieri et al. 2011 meta-analysis, 164 studies**
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+ ([paper](https://physics.uwyo.edu/~rudim/S14_JEduPsych_DoesDiscoveryLrngEnhance.pdf)).
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+ Unassisted discovery loses to explicit instruction (d = −0.38); discovery
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+ *with* feedback, worked examples, scaffolding and elicited explanations
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+ beats it (d = +0.30). Pure Socratic questioning with no support is the
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+ worst of the options, not the best.
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+ - **Bisra et al. 2018 meta-analysis, 69 effect sizes**
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+ ([paper](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10648-018-9434-x)).
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+ Inducing self-explanation: g = 0.55, across conceptual and procedural
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+ knowledge alike.
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+ - **Expertise reversal** ([meta-analysis](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959475225000660)).
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+ Worked examples help novices and hurt the already-competent, which is why
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+ rule 3 is per piece rather than per session.
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+
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+ - **Brief but Impactful, LAK 2026, 191 students, 2,075 hours**
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+ ([paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09994)). Human tutor check-ins during
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+ math practice lifted engagement during and after a visit *"irrespective of
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+ visit length"*, and *"concrete, stepwise scaffolding with explicit work
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+ organization"* lifted it most. Middle-school math, so transfer is weak, but
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+ the shape it favours — several short well-timed contacts over one long one —
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+ is the shape rule 1 now asks for.
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+
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+ **Honest limitation:** the intervention studies with the cleanest numbers ran
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+ on novices and juniors; the graduate-level result above is the closest to a
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+ senior engineer and it measured LLM-use habits, not a real ticket. Rules 1
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+ and 2 carry real experimental support; rule 3 is extrapolation from the
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+ expertise-reversal literature, not a measured result; rule 5 rests on
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+ scaffolding theory rather than a trial that fixed the fade point.
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+ from importlib.metadata import version
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+
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+ __version__ = version("teachback")
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+
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+
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+ def main() -> None:
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+ print(f"teachback {__version__}: early placeholder, nothing to run yet.")
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+ version = 1
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+ revision = 2
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+ requires-python = ">=3.10"
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+
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+ [[package]]
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+ name = "teachback"
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+ version = "0.0.3"
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+ source = { editable = "." }