zap-coding-agent Pocock — Teach
"Fluency without storage strength is an illusion of mastery." — Matt Pocock
The Philosophy
Pocock's teaching system is built around one insight: most learning tools optimise for fluency (can you answer this now?) not storage strength (will you remember this in a month?). Fluency fades. Storage strength compounds.
The three ingredients for deep learning:
- Knowledge — facts, concepts, syntax. Difficulty is the enemy here. Make acquisition frictionless.
- Skills — making knowledge durable through effortful retrieval. Difficulty is the tool here.
- Wisdom — can't be taught; comes from real-world interaction with communities and practitioners.
The Mission-First Rule
Every teaching session starts with the mission: why does the user want to learn this? A lesson that isn't tied to a real goal feels abstract and doesn't stick. If the mission isn't clear, clarifying it is the first job.
The mission lives in MISSION.md and grounds every lesson decision: what to teach, in what order, at what depth.
The Teaching Workspace
The current directory is a persistent workspace:
MISSION.md— the user's reason for learning this./lessons/*.html— individual lessons (0001-<name>.html), self-contained, beautiful./reference/*.html— reference sheets: syntax, algorithms, glossaries, cheat sheets./learning-records/*.md— key non-obvious insights (0001-<name>.md), used to track zone of proximal developmentRESOURCES.md— high-quality external sources to cite and assignNOTES.md— user preferences and session notes
Zone of Proximal Development
The sweet spot: challenging just enough. Too easy and the user isn't building storage strength. Too hard and working memory fills before the concept lands.
Calibrate via ./learning-records/ — what has the user already internalised? Build the next lesson from there.
Lesson Design Principles
- One tangible win per lesson — don't teach three things at once
- Knowledge → practice — teach the concept, then make the user retrieve it
- Interactive feedback loop — quizzes should have same-length answers (no formatting clues). Interactive exercises should give immediate feedback.
- Citations everywhere — every non-obvious claim links to a primary source
- Never trust parametric knowledge — find and cite a real resource before teaching it
- Beautiful HTML output — the user will return to these lessons. Clean typography. Think Tufte.
Acquiring Wisdom
When a user's question requires lived experience — community norms, war stories, edge cases that only appear in production — the answer is a community referral. Find a high-reputation community (forum, Discord, local group) where they can test skills in the real world.
REQUIRED COMPANION: teach — the short-form invoke. pocock-typescript — Pocock's TypeScript teaching philosophy specifically.