6 posts tagged with "Authoring"

In our previous post we walked through deploying an AI-generated Educates workshop on a local Kubernetes cluster. The workshop was up and running, accessible through the training portal, and ready to be used. But having a workshop that runs is only the first step. The next question is whether it's actually any good.

Workshop review is traditionally a manual process. You open the workshop in a browser, click through each page, read the instructions, run the commands, check that everything works, and make notes on what could be improved. It's time-consuming and somewhat tedious, especially when you're the person who wrote the workshop in the first place and already know what it's supposed to do. Even this task, though, is one where AI can help.

The way we direct AI coding agents has changed significantly over the past couple of years. Early on, the interaction was purely conversational. You'd open a chat, explain what you wanted, provide whatever context seemed relevant, and hope the model could work with it. If it got something wrong or went down the wrong path, you'd correct it and try again. It worked, but it was ad hoc. Every session started from scratch. Every conversation required re-establishing context.

What's happened since then is a steady progression toward giving agents more structured, persistent knowledge to work with. Each step in that progression has made agents meaningfully more capable, to the point where they can now handle tasks that would have been unrealistic even a year ago. We've been putting these capabilities to work on a specific challenge: getting an AI to author interactive workshops for the Educates training platform. In our previous posts we talked about why workshop content is actually a good fit for AI generation. Here we want to explain how we've been making that work in practice.

The idea of guided instruction in tutorials isn't new. Most online tutorials these days provide a click-to-copy icon next to commands and code snippets. It's a useful convenience. You see the command you need to run, you click the icon, and it lands in your clipboard ready to paste. Better than selecting text by hand and hoping you got the right boundaries.

But this convenience only goes so far. The instructions still assume you have a suitable environment set up on your own machine. The commands might reference tools you haven't installed, paths that don't exist in your setup, or configuration that differs from what the tutorial expects. The copy button solves the mechanics of getting text into your clipboard, but the real friction is in the gap between the tutorial and your environment. You end up spending more time troubleshooting your local setup than actually learning the thing the tutorial was supposed to teach you.

We are excited to announce the launch of Educates Hub, the official resource aggregator for the Educates community! You can explore it today at https://hub.educates.dev.

Educates Hub is your new central destination for discovering, sharing, and managing resources for your workshops. Our goal is to create a vibrant ecosystem where the community can easily access high-quality content and tools to make the most out of Educates.

When you run Educates locally, it's easy to go with the defaults, just create your Educates cluster as explained in the Getting Started on Kind article.

But that is not the most optimal workflow. Why?

Because we recommend using SSL for your local environment, and for that, we also recommend to use a recognizable DNS name for your cluster. This makes things easier, and also shields you from roaming, so that when you move from one location to another, and your ip changes, the nip.io address change don't affect you. Also, using a name for your cluster makes things easier when you want to have your descriptors or config under version control.

We will demonstrate how to:

• Create a local Certificate Authority (CA) so that you can have trust between your local computer and your cluster
• Configure a local DNS resolver to provide your cluster with a recognizable name
• Create your cluster so that it uses both and creates ingresses to your workshops using working SSL

Now that you have created your local cluster it's time to create your first workshop.

Educates CLI provides commands to get you started, and provides you with a skeleton of a workshop. This workshop is not going to have any addition, but we will be augmenting this workshop's content and capabilities in later posts.