Shikhu is a command-line tool and agent skill I built to close the gap between generating code with an agent and actually understanding it. It reads your codebase file by file, generates conceptual quizzes, and tracks how well you do over time — a metric I call knowledge coverage, kind of like test coverage, but for your own understanding.
How it works
- Generates multiple-choice questions from your source files using Mercury, a fast text-diffusion model
- Tracks "golden" questions — ones you answer correctly and mark as good — with three per file counting as full coverage
- Detects when a file changes and re-validates the questions that have gone stale
- Ships a /shikhu-study skill that walks you through a file and seeds new quizzes from the questions you actually ask
Why I built it
Recent research suggests coding agents can quietly erode the very skills we need to supervise them. Shikhu is my attempt to keep learning while still moving fast — by making conceptual engagement a measurable, repeatable habit. Everything lives in a local SQLite file; nothing leaves your machine except calls to the Mercury API under your own key.