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Productivity Jumps Stair-Step Infographic

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About This MicroSim

This interactive infographic tells the story of how authoring an intelligent textbook has gone from a year-plus undertaking to an afternoon of work. Each rising step on the staircase represents a generation of tooling, and the height of the step reflects productivity on a logarithmic scale — every full step up is roughly an order-of-magnitude gain.

Step Tool Person-Hours Speed-up
1 Manual (by hand) 3,000 baseline
2 ChatGPT — generate pages & elements 1,000 3×
3 Claude Code — agentic workflows 100 30×
4 Claude Code Skills — full-book automation 10 300×

The labels above each step show the person-hours and the speed-up over manual work; the labels below name the tool. Clicking a step opens a detailed description panel beneath the diagram.

How to Use

  • Click any step in the staircase to read a detailed description of that tool in the panel below the diagram.
  • Use the ◀ Prev and Next ▶ buttons to walk up and down the staircase one step at a time.
  • Use Reset to return to the Manual baseline.

The MicroSim opens with the Manual baseline selected so the concept is visible immediately; explore upward to watch the person-hours fall by orders of magnitude.

Iframe Embed Code

You can add this MicroSim to any web page by adding this to your HTML:

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<iframe src="https://dmccreary.github.io/intelligent-textbooks/sims/productivity-jumps/main.html"
        height="597px"
        width="100%"
        scrolling="no"></iframe>

Lesson Plan

Grade Level

Undergraduate / professional development for educators and content authors.

Duration

5-10 minutes

Prerequisites

Familiarity with the general idea of authoring digital educational content.

Learning Objectives

After using this MicroSim, learners will be able to:

  1. Illustrate how each generation of AI tooling reduces the effort needed to author an intelligent textbook.
  2. Compare the person-hours required across the four authoring approaches on a logarithmic productivity scale.
  3. Explain why reusable Claude Code Skills produce an order-of-magnitude productivity jump over prompting individual pages.

Activities

  1. Exploration (3 min): Click each step in order, from Manual to Claude Code Skills, and read the description for each.
  2. Guided Practice (3 min): Ask learners to identify which transition produces the largest single jump in productivity and to articulate why (moving from generating individual elements to automating whole workflows).
  3. Assessment (3 min): Have learners estimate the speed-up multiplier between adjacent steps and rank the four approaches by person-hours.

Discussion Questions

  • Why does encoding a workflow as a reusable Skill outperform prompting for one page at a time?
  • What kinds of textbook content are easiest to automate, and which still benefit most from human authorship?

Assessment

  • Learners can correctly order the four approaches by person-hours.
  • Learners can describe at least one reason the Skills step achieves a 300× improvement over manual authoring.

References

  1. Intelligent Textbooks Site — the project this MicroSim documents.
  2. Claude Code — agentic coding tool used to author content directly in project files.
  3. Five Levels of Intelligent Textbooks — background on the spectrum of textbook intelligence.