ELI5

2026-08-22T00:00:00+12:00

Thariq at Anthropic posted that it’s a skill people there have been using a lot recently: /eli5 <what you want to explain>.

I tried it on neural networks. Here’s what it made.

The first pass had bad colors, low contrast, hard to read. One follow-up prompt asking for a color fix and it was done.

No formulas, no sigmoid, no softmax, none of the math that actually makes a neural network work. It’s missing for good. What’s left is the dataflow — inputs go in, get combined, come out the other end as a decision — drawn simply enough to follow at a glance.

That’s the trade the skill makes, and it’s the right one for someone who isn’t about to read a textbook. eli5 is good exactly because it throws out the complexity most explanations lead with. I imagine this isn’t just for self-learning — it’s a genuinely useful tool for collaboration, communication, meetings. Conveying an idea isn’t easy. ;P

Updated at 2026-08-23. The neural network example is ported to julin.ai now.

Ju Lin's AI Weblog: Claude-Plugins

ELI5