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Maieutic is a pedagogical IDE built on the premise that the most valuable programming skills today are not writing code from scratch, but specifying behavior precisely, reading code critically, and explaining the gap between intent and output. It uses Claude Opus (claude-opus-4-7) as a structured interlocutor — a presence that asks the right questions rather than providing the right answers.

Quick start

Set up Maieutic locally and run your first exercise in minutes.

Student experience

Understand the three-phase workflow students move through.

Instructor tools

Author exercises, monitor the live dashboard, and review session reasoning.

How Opus works

Learn what Opus does at each of the seven moments in a session.

What Maieutic teaches

Maieutic builds three durable skills that matter as AI-assisted coding becomes the norm:

Precise specification

Students describe what a program should do before writing a line of code. Opus blocks progress until the spec answers every obvious question.

Critical debugging

Students write in Monaco with autocomplete off. Opus answers syntax questions directly but returns counter-questions for reasoning gaps.

Intent-diff awareness

After submitting code, students explain every place it diverges from their own specification — building the habit of reading code against intent.

Who it’s for

Students

Work through exercises in a structured three-phase loop: write a spec, write the code, explain where they diverged.

Instructors

Author exercises in seconds, watch a live per-student dashboard, and review per-session reasoning transcripts and cohort analytics.

Getting started

1

Install dependencies

Clone the repo and run npm install. You need Node 20+ and an Anthropic API key.
2

Configure your environment

Copy .env.example to .env and set ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-....
3

Initialise the database

Run npx prisma migrate dev to apply migrations and generate the Prisma client.
4

Start the server

Run npm run dev and open http://localhost:3000. The landing page asks whether you’re a student or a teacher and routes accordingly.
The landing page requires no login. Students navigate to /exercises; instructors navigate to /live. This is an MVP — authentication is intentionally left out of scope.

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