french-cli

Agent + CLI that turns Claude into a private French tutor: track progress, get an overview, get advice, read stories, and learn & practice French (written and spoken) online from your phone.

What you get

• An agent-first CLI cited from teken (afi-cli) — the runtime package has no third-party dependencies.
• A mesh identity — culture.yaml (suffix + backend) and the matching resident prompt file (AGENTS.colleague.md, since this template runs backend: colleague).
• The canonical guildmaster skill kit (11 skills) under .claude/skills/, vendored cite-don't-import. See docs/skill-sources.md.
• A build + deploy baseline — pytest, lint, the agent-first rubric gate, and PyPI Trusted Publishing wired into GitHub Actions.

Quickstart

uv sync
uv run pytest -n auto                 # run the test suite
uv run french whoami                  # identity from culture.yaml
uv run french learn                   # self-teaching prompt (add --json)
uv run teken cli doctor . --strict    # the agent-first rubric gate CI runs

The installed command is french; the PyPI package and repo are french-cli. french explain french and french explain french-cli both resolve to the root doc entry.

CLI

french-cli is an LLM-free tutor engine that implements the learn subject-plugin contract: it owns the committed French content (stories, lessons, exercises) and each learner's mastery state, resolves what to teach next, and emits structured teaching directives. The driving agent (or human) does the conversational tutoring the directive describes, grades pass|partial|fail, and writes the result back with record. french never converses, grades free text, or computes scores — learn-cli's motivation layer does the scoring.

Tutor verbs (the contract surface)

Agent-first verbs

Every command supports --json. Results go to stdout, errors/diagnostics to stderr (never mixed). Exit codes: 0 success, 1 user error, 2 environment error, 3+ reserved.

Learner state

Learner-scoped verbs take --learner <id> (default: $FRENCH_CLI_LEARNER or the OS user; the resolved id is echoed back). State persists one JSON file per learner under $FRENCH_CLI_LEARN_HOME (or $XDG_DATA_HOME/french_cli/learn, or ~/.local/share/french_cli/learn), written atomically and resumed across sessions.

Content

Stories are committed JSON files under content/stories/*.json (flat, one file per story, filename == id), each validated against the shared story schema in CI (tests/test_story_content.py). The starter set ships dev-prefixed dev stories; the full graded ladder is authored separately. The curriculum (modules, lessons, items, exercises) lives as structured data in french/tutor/curriculum.py.

The contract schemas + validator are cited (cite-don't-import) into french/contract_cite/ — see docs/contract-provenance.md.

See CLAUDE.md for the architecture and the full conventions (version-bump-every-PR, the cicd PR lane, deploy setup).

License

Apache 2.0 — see LICENSE.