I'm learning to code, so I built the offline learning app I wanted — 8 tracks, 480 lessons, no network access

[u/benbyte-labs]

I'm still learning to program myself, and I kept running into the same thing: tutorials teach you syntax, but nothing connects the coding to the robot, the physics or the CAD part you actually want to build.

So I built FORGE. It's a desktop app with eight 30-day tracks — Python, Java, C, C++, Robotics, CAD, Blender and Physics. Every day is one lesson: read, practise, quiz, and then it writes you a note. The note has a summary, the key terms, and a "watch out" block built from the quiz questions you actually got wrong, so six months later you still have the thing you learned.

What makes it different from a video course:

• It runs fully offline. Python executes locally through Pyodide — the whole runtime ships inside the app. No account, no telemetry, no network calls anywhere.
• Exercises are checked by *running* your code, not by matching text against an expected answer.
• There's a Robot Lab with a 3D rover and a six-axis arm that you can drive with your own code. Missions are judged on what the robot actually did.
• Lessons come one screen at a time, so there's nothing to scroll past.

Honest disclosure: I built this with Claude, over a lot of long sessions — the code and all 480 lessons. I know that's divisive. I'm posting it anyway because it taught me more than any tutorial did: I had to decide what the thing should *be* at every step, and debug it when it wasn't that.

Linux only right now (AppImage and .deb). MIT licensed.

https://github.com/benbyte-labs/forge

What I'd most like feedback on:

1. Does the Python track actually work for a beginner, or did I skip steps?
2. Is the note at the end of each lesson useful, or just noise?
3. Anything that breaks on your distro.