Didactopus/README.md

Didactopus

Didactopus is a local-first AI-assisted autodidactic mastery platform for building genuine expertise through concept graphs, adaptive curriculum planning, evidence-driven mastery, Socratic mentoring, and project-based learning.

Tagline: Many arms, one goal — mastery.

Recent revisions

This revision introduces a pluggable evaluator pipeline that converts learner attempts into structured mastery evidence.

The prior revision adds an agentic learner loop that turns Didactopus into a closed-loop mastery system prototype.

The loop can now:

• choose the next concept via the graph-aware planner
• generate a synthetic learner attempt
• score the attempt into evidence
• update mastery state
• repeat toward a target concept

This is still scaffold-level, but it is the first explicit implementation of the idea that Didactopus can supervise not only human learners, but also AI student agents.

Complete overview to this point

Didactopus currently includes:

• Domain packs for concepts, projects, rubrics, mastery profiles, templates, and cross-pack links
• Dependency resolution across packs
• Merged learning graph generation
• Concept graph engine for cross-pack prerequisite reasoning, linking, pathfinding, and export
• Adaptive learner engine for ready, blocked, and mastered concepts
• Evidence engine with weighted, recency-aware, multi-dimensional mastery inference
• Concept-specific mastery profiles with template inheritance
• Graph-aware planner for utility-ranked next-step recommendations
• Agentic learner loop for iterative goal-directed mastery acquisition

Agentic AI students

An AI student under Didactopus is modeled as an agent that accumulates evidence against concept mastery criteria.

It does not “learn” in the same sense that model weights are retrained inside Didactopus. Instead, its learned mastery is represented as:

• current mastered concept set
• evidence history
• dimension-level competence summaries
• concept-specific weak dimensions
• adaptive plan state
• optional artifacts, explanations, project outputs, and critiques it has produced

In other words, Didactopus represents mastery as a structured operational state, not merely a chat transcript.

That state can be put to work by:

• selecting tasks the agent is now qualified to attempt
• routing domain-relevant problems to the agent
• exposing mastered concept profiles to orchestration logic
• using evidence summaries to decide whether the agent should act, defer, or review
• exporting a mastery portfolio for downstream use

FAQ

See:

• docs/faq.md

Correctness and formal knowledge components

See:

• docs/correctness-and-knowledge-engine.md

Short version: yes, there is a strong argument that Didactopus will eventually benefit from a more formal knowledge-engine layer, especially for domains where correctness can be stated in symbolic, logical, computational, or rule-governed terms.

A good future architecture is likely hybrid:

• LLM/agentic layer for explanation, synthesis, critique, and exploration
• formal knowledge engine for rule checking, constraint satisfaction, proof support, symbolic validation, and executable correctness checks

Repository structure

didactopus/
├── README.md
├── artwork/
├── configs/
├── docs/
├── domain-packs/
├── src/didactopus/
└── tests/