Build An AI Tutor For Any Topic (Free Setup Guide)

Turn any textbook, curriculum, or YouTube video into a self-guided course that teaches you and quizzes you. Two free Claude skills, one capstone prompt. You retain about 10% of what you passively watch, but about 75% of what you actively use.

What You'll Learn

• The two free skills that stack: the wiki builder and the tutor engine
• The setup flow: sources into a folder, wiki, interactive knowledge map
• The capstone prompt that turns the map into a full Khan-Academy-style course with quizzes
• A worked example you can copy: a financial-analysis tutor built entirely from free sources

What You're Building

Two free skills that stack, plus one prompt that turns the result into a real course. Understand-Anything gives you the map of how a topic connects. The capstone prompt turns that map into the course: lessons, quizzes, and a final exam, all built from your own material.

• A. The Wiki Builder (Karpathy LLM Wiki skill). Turns your raw sources into a connected wiki, where every concept links to the ones around it. Based on Andrej Karpathy's LLM-wiki method (the pattern everyone's copying).
• B. The Tutor Engine (Understand-Anything, 59k+ stars). Turns that wiki into an interactive knowledge graph you can walk through, search, and chat with, with a guided learning order and a quiz mode.

Why this beats NotebookLM: NotebookLM gives you a chatbot sitting on top of your notes. This builds an actual map of how every idea connects, then a self-guided course on top of it.

The Setup

Install once, then it's the same flow for any topic for the rest of your life.

Step 0: One-time install. Add both free skills inside Claude Code, then restart Claude Code so everything loads.

# 1. Understand-Anything (the tutor engine)
/plugin marketplace add Egonex-AI/Understand-Anything
/plugin install understand-anything

# 2. Karpathy LLM Wiki (the wiki builder): github.com/Astro-Han/karpathy-llm-wiki
# add it as a Claude skill per its README, then restart Claude Code

Step 1: Gather your sources. Make a topic folder with a raw/ subfolder and fill it with your material as text or markdown.

• A YouTube video or playlist? Pull the transcripts into raw/
• A textbook, curriculum, or PDF? Export to text/markdown into raw/
• Articles or your own notes? Drop them straight in

Step 2: Build the wiki. Point the Karpathy wiki skill at your folder. It reads everything in raw/ and compiles a set of linked articles plus an index ordered from beginner to advanced. Prompt for Claude Code:

Ingest everything in ./raw/ into my wiki. Compile it into linked articles, one per concept, cross-linked, with an index.md ordered from beginner to advanced - the order someone should learn this topic in.

Step 3: Build the tutor. One command turns the wiki into an interactive map:

/understand-knowledge ~/your-topic-folder

Step 4: Walk through it + quiz yourself. The dashboard is a visual map you explore in the right order. Chat runs over the graph, so answers come from your real sources.

/understand-dashboard
/understand-chat Explain how these concepts connect, then quiz me with 5 questions and grade my answers.

The Capstone: A Real Course

This is the payoff. After the graph is built, paste this one prompt and Claude turns your whole topic into a self-guided, Khan-Academy-style course: lessons, quizzes, progress tracking, and a final exam, all in a single file you can open and even share.

You just built a knowledge graph from my material with Understand-Anything. Now turn that same knowledge into a complete, self-guided course I can learn from, Khan Academy style. Use my wiki articles and the learning order in index.md as the single source of truth. Do not add facts that aren't in my material.

Build ONE self-contained interactive HTML file called course.html that works offline (inline all CSS and JS). It must include:

1. A SIDEBAR outline in the learning order from index.md: modules (the ## categories) with their lessons (the articles), each with a completion check.
2. EACH LESSON: learning objectives; a plain-English explanation from the wiki with key terms bolded; one worked example; and a "Check your understanding" quiz of 3-5 questions (multiple choice + short answer) that reveals the correct answer with a one-line why, and scores the lesson.
3. PROGRESS + MASTERY saved to localStorage so it persists, with a top progress bar showing overall % complete.
4. A FINAL EXAM of ~15 questions across all modules, graded, with a list of exactly which lessons to review for anything missed.
5. On each lesson, a "Stuck? Ask your tutor" note telling me to run /understand-chat for a deeper explanation of that concept.

Design: clean, light, friendly, Khan-Academy-like. Output the full course.html and tell me how to open it.

The full flow: install the skills, drop in your material, run /understand-knowledge, paste this prompt, and you have a self-guided AI tutor with quizzes and learning guides, for any topic.

Worked Example: Financial Analysis

A real run you can copy. Every source here is free and openly licensed, so you can build the exact same tutor.

1. Gather free sources into raw/: the SEC "Beginner's Guide to Financial Statements," the OpenStax "Principles of Finance" textbook, MIT OpenCourseWare 15.401 lecture notes, and Aswath Damodaran's free valuation notes.
2. Build the wiki with the Karpathy skill: linked articles on the three statements, ratio analysis, time value of money, valuation, and capital budgeting, ordered beginner to advanced.
3. Run /understand-knowledge: the interactive map of how it all connects.
4. Run the capstone prompt: a self-guided course that teaches each concept and quizzes you, ending in a final exam.

Free sources: openstax.org (Principles of Finance), sec.gov (financial statements guide), ocw.mit.edu (15.401), pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar (Damodaran valuation).

Honest note: this isn't "paste a YouTube link and it just works." The flow is sources, then wiki, then tutor, then course. That wiki step is exactly why the result understands how a topic connects, instead of just answering questions about it.

Why This Beats NotebookLM

NotebookLM gives you a chatbot that answers questions about your notes. This turns the same material into an interactive map and a self-guided course that quizzes you, so you actually learn the topic instead of just looking things up.

Go Deeper

Prefer a printable version? Download the PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-KdX7_nj_sbA3KK0Jyqi5GaGFIUdEEoH/view?usp=drivesdk

Want the whole system installed live, with Cooper on the call? Build Your Own AI, the two week sprint runs the first two weeks of August.

Or get a new working tool every Monday inside The AI Operator community on Whop.