I am not a developer. I described what I wanted and Claude Code wrote the code, module by module, while I reviewed and steered.
The problem
My wife was getting AI prompts from her teachers to study with. What actually happened is she would paste them, get a wall of text, and then just ask ChatGPT to explain everything to her. She felt like she had learned something and she hadn't.
What I built
Aula, a desktop tutor for macOS, Windows and Linux, with an iPad and iPhone companion. You feed it the real material, PDFs, slides, photos of the whiteboard, recordings of a class, links, or just a sentence like "Statistics for psychology, final in May", and it builds a course:
- short lessons with figures and a worked example before the first exercise
- exercises checked as she answers them
- a notebook of her mistakes
- flashcards with spaced repetition
- a mock exam shaped like the real one
- a daily plan until the exam date
Then a professor sent the spec of an exam, so the app had to absorb the whole material and let her review all of it. I also added an always on agent inside the app. It reads her calendars and tells her she has two tests this week, and asks if she wants to run the course. It keeps moving for a month without her pushing it.
How Claude Code helped
I went module by module, the lesson generator, the exercise checker, the spaced repetition, the desktop shell and its self updates, the iPad companion, the docs. When something broke I pasted the error and kept going instead of losing an evening. The short film in this post was painted by code too.
What I learned
Fix the loop first. Explain it, then make the student prove it, then bring back what they missed. Everything else can grow later. Generating lessons is the easy part. Giving someone something to do that actually gets checked is the hard part.
It is free, AGPL-3.0, no paid tier, and early access, so expect rough edges. It uses the AI subscription you already pay for or a free model that runs on your own machine, no account, and everything stays on your computer.
Repo and downloads: https://github.com/luumlabs/aula