Feynman It
Turn anything complicated into a short, hand-illustrated PDF — built the way Richard Feynman actually taught.
A confusing AI answer. A jargon-heavy article. An unfamiliar codebase. A whole book. Re-reading or re-asking doesn't make dense things click — Feynman It does, by forcing the explanation through Feynman's own method instead of just prompting an AI to "explain it simpler."
A Claude Code Skill. Say what you want explained, get a polished PDF on your Desktop a few minutes later.
Why this works
Most "explain it simply" prompts just make the same wall of text shorter. Feynman It enforces the actual technique:
- One plain sentence. No jargon allowed in it.
- Explain it to a smart 12-year-old. Short, concrete, no hand-waving.
- An analogy — with its own picture. Something you already live with, mapped onto the unfamiliar thing.
- The gaps people get wrong, named explicitly. The highest-value part of any explanation is usually the part that gets skipped.
- A one-breath recap you could repeat to a friend.
And it holds itself to the pictures-only test: flip through just the diagrams and captions, skip every word of prose, and you should still get the gist. Every major idea earns a hand-authored diagram — not decoration, not a stock icon, an actual figure that teaches the point.
See it in action
Nine topics, nine different accent colors — each explainer picks its own, not a reskinned template:
| Topic | Category |
|---|---|
| Claude Skills vs. Claude Agents | AI/dev concept |
| How Feynman It builds a PDF | Unfamiliar codebase, onboarded without reading it cold |
| Don't Make Me Think, compressed | A whole book, one sitting |
| Quantum Entanglement | Physics |
| How LLMs Generate Text | AI/dev concept |
| Why Raising Interest Rates Fights Inflation | Economics |
| How Blockchain Actually Works | Tech |
| Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem | Math |
| How Feynman It Works — the method itself | Meta |
Each folder has the full PDF plus PNG exports of the best pages.
Install
Requires Claude Code, Python 3, and Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge installed (used headlessly to render the PDF — no extra Python packages needed).
git clone https://github.com/TadTheFisherman/feynman-it.gitCopy the cloned folder into your Claude Code skills directory, named feynman-pdf (that's the skill's technical id — the repo itself is named for the public brand):
# macOS / Linux
cp -r feynman-it ~/.claude/skills/feynman-pdf
# Windows (PowerShell)
Copy-Item -Recurse feynman-it "$env:USERPROFILE\.claude\skills\feynman-pdf"Restart Claude Code (or start a new session) and it's live.
Use it
Just ask, in plain language:
"Feynman this article for me: [paste link or text]"
"Make me an illustrated explainer on how DNS works"
"Explain the auth module in this codebase like I'm onboarding as a new hire"
"Compress this book into a one-page PDF: [title/notes]"
You don't need to say "Feynman" — any request for a clear, diagram-rich explainer PDF triggers it. The finished PDF lands on your Desktop; everything else stays in a scratch folder that gets cleaned up automatically.
What it's not
Not a generic PDF generator — it's the Feynman method plus hand-drawn diagrams, specifically. If you want a form filled out, two PDFs merged, or a report of raw data, that's a different tool.