Academy Coach — learn Claude Code hands-on and get your setup reviewed

Academy Coach is a free, open-source Claude Code plugin that teaches you Anthropic products from the official Claude Academy curriculum and reviews how you actually work with Claude Code against Anthropic's best practices. It adds two skills to Claude Code: academy-learn, an interactive tutor that runs Academy lessons inside your real repository, and academy-review, a coach that audits your session and setup and tells you what to improve.

MIT licensed. No signup, no telemetry, nothing leaves your machine.

Install · What each skill does · How it works · FAQ

Use Academy Coach when:

• You are learning Claude Code (or Claude.ai, Cowork, Tag, the Claude API, or MCP) and want lessons with exercises in your own project instead of reading course pages
• You want to know whether your Claude Code setup — CLAUDE.md, plan mode, hooks, permission modes — actually follows Anthropic's best practices
• You are onboarding a team to Claude Code and need a repeatable curriculum plus a workflow review for each developer
• You finished a Claude.ai or Cowork session and want feedback on how you could have worked better

What each skill does

academy-learn — an interactive Claude Code tutor

Teaches the Claude Academy curriculum one unit at a time, hands-on:

• Covers all six Academy tracks: Claude Code, Claude.ai, Claude Cowork, Claude Tag (Slack), the Claude API / Platform / MCP, and AI Fluency
• Exercises run in your actual project — learning CLAUDE.md means improving your CLAUDE.md, learning subagents means dispatching one on your code
• Conversational quizzes after each unit, wrong answers explained
• Every unit links the real Academy course it came from
• Progress persists between sessions ("continue my academy lesson" resumes where you left off)

academy-review — a Claude Code best-practices coach

Audits how you work with Claude Code and returns ranked, teachable findings:

• Checks CLAUDE.md quality, plan-mode use, context hygiene, subagent/hook/skill usage, permission modes, and verification habits
• Scores against Anthropic's AI Fluency 4D framework (Delegation, Description, Discernment, Diligence)
• Evidence-based: reports only what it actually observed, never guessed
• Top 3–5 findings ranked by impact, each linked to the Academy lesson that teaches the fix
• Also reviews pasted Claude.ai / Cowork / Tag transcripts against those products' best practices

Install

/plugin marketplace add MrMarudi/academy-coach
/plugin install academy-coach@academy-coach-marketplace

Then say "teach me Claude Code" or "review my session". If skills don't auto-trigger (see FAQ), invoke explicitly: "use the academy-learn skill".

How it works

Each skill is a SKILL.md instruction set plus distilled knowledge files: per-track curriculum summaries with teachable units, exercises, quizzes, and review rubrics, all sourced from academy.claude.com, plus a 297-item index of every Academy course, tutorial, and use case generated from Anthropic's live catalog JSON — so links point at real, current courses instead of stale summaries.

The skills were hardened through a self-improvement loop: fresh headless Claude Code sessions ran realistic scenarios, independent judge agents graded the transcripts against strict rubrics, and every failure became a skill fix — 13 versions until the full suite passed. Real defects that loop caught: the tutor lecturing four features in one message, offering to do the exercise itself instead of assigning it, and rating "habits" from config files instead of observed behavior.

Frequently asked questions

How is this different from Anthropic's official academy-guide skill?

Anthropic's academy-guide skill recommends Academy course links after answering questions, while Academy Coach teaches the content and reviews your workflow. academy-learn runs lessons, exercises, and quizzes in your repo; academy-review returns ranked findings with evidence. They compose well: academy-guide is the index, Academy Coach is the class plus the report card.

Does it send my code or data anywhere?

Academy Coach sends nothing anywhere: it is local skill files — markdown instructions that run inside your own Claude Code session. No telemetry, no server, no account.

What can I learn with it?

The full Claude Academy curriculum: Claude Code workflows (explore→plan→code→commit, CLAUDE.md, subagents, skills, hooks, MCP, headless mode), the Claude API and Platform (tool use, RAG, prompt evaluation, MCP servers), Claude.ai (Projects, Artifacts, Connectors), Claude Cowork, Claude Tag, and the AI Fluency framework.

Why don't the skills trigger automatically sometimes?

A known Claude Code bug (#57515, #68677) intermittently drops plugin skill descriptions from the session context, more likely the more plugins you have. Explicit invocation always works: "use the academy-learn skill: teach me Claude Code".

Is it affiliated with Anthropic?

Academy Coach is an independent open-source project, not affiliated with Anthropic. Claude, Claude Code, and Claude Academy are Anthropic products; the knowledge files are distilled summaries that link to and cite academy.claude.com rather than copying it.

Repository structure

plugins/academy-coach/
├── skills/
│   ├── academy-learn/SKILL.md    ← the tutor
│   └── academy-review/SKILL.md   ← the coach
└── knowledge/                    ← distilled curriculum, one file per track
    ├── claude-code.md  platform.md  claude-ai.md
    ├── cowork.md  tag.md  ai-fluency.md
    └── catalog-index.md          ← all 297 Academy items with links

License

MIT. See LICENSE. Curriculum content belongs to Anthropic PBC; this project links and cites, not copies.

Maintained by Marudi (MrMarudi).

Current version: 0.1.13 (August 2026). Curriculum snapshot: 2026-08-21, refreshed from the live Academy catalog at academy.claude.com.