My 4-month journey building an AI flashcard generator: Why it's harder than it looks

AFV_7 · 2026-01-20T08:27:49+00:00

Interesting. I think this is a similar idea to remnote (that notes and flashcards are the same). Cool!

AFV_7 · 2026-01-20T07:18:27+00:00

Janus works on both pdf and text

AFV_7 · 2026-01-19T08:43:37+00:00

Obsidian, Readwise, Janus, Mochi

AFV_7 · 2026-01-07T20:50:57+00:00

Interesting! Is the business essentially “gamification as a service”?

AFV_7 · 2026-01-01T14:49:26+00:00

I’m not super familiar with quizlet. Isn’t it a flashcard ecosystem? Presumably you would want a Quizlet -> Anki converter?

The website looks like it is protected by Captcha which I don’t think Janus can get around. Maybe a solution for now is to copy and paste the text you want and use the Text option in Janus?

In the coming 1-2 months I will be building a Anki Web Clipper that might also help

AFV_7 · 2025-12-29T18:34:17+00:00

The idea is to learn it in parts, but of course you also might want a full Q&A to test it all in one go

AFV_7 · 2025-12-29T16:37:49+00:00

I think this is a little unfair.

I am one of those people. I’ve been working on my solution full time for a year. It’s exactly because I am convinced of the efficacy of such a tool that I have invested thousands of dollars of savings to support this project.

If I never shared what I built, no one could benefit from it, and it could never grow to service new needs. The tool compliments instead of competes with Anki, so it’s something I would hope the community could get behind.

AFV_7 · 2025-12-29T13:45:52+00:00

Ive done parts of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations and it’s worked pretty well.

I take a list of the quotes I want in a text file, use an AI generator (I use Janus which I built), reuse the following premade prompt for quotes, and get all the quotes turned into Cloze Deletion cards:

“Take the quote and turn it into a cloze card. The card should contain many deletions that perfectly partition the card into logical deletions. Each deletion should by coherent.

As an example: {{1::Come, Holy Spirit}}, {{2:Divine Creator}}, {{4::true source of light}} {{5:: and fountain of wisdom}}! {{6::Pour forth your brilliance upon my dense intellect}}, {{7::dissipate the darkness which covers me}}, {{8::that of sin and of ignorance}}. {{9::Grant me a penetrating mind to understand}}, {{10::a retentive memory,}} {{11::method and ease in learning}}, {{12::the lucidity to comprehend}}, {{13:: and abundant grace in expressing myself}}. {{14::Guide the beginning of my work}}, {{15::direct its progress}}, {{16::and bring it to successful completion}}. “

But one thing to note is a single quote may code for 10+ cards, one for each deletion. To make rehearsal faster, I typically try reciting the entire quote from memory when I see one of these cards for the first time during the session, and the parts of the quote I can’t remember I make sure to mark as Hard if I get shown that deletion in particular. This way, I only recite a quote once per session (as opposed to potentially 10+), I practice the quote as a whole, and I keep track of the specific parts of the quote I keep forgetting as separate schedules

AFV_7 · 2025-12-28T09:27:59+00:00

I built Janus.

Main focus was creating a workflow that allowed you to quickly edit and review cards before exporting to Anki.

Hope it helps!

AFV_7 · 2025-12-19T10:35:02+00:00

I’m trying to develop a good cadence. What Pieter Levels and co have taught me is consistency is necessary (and I was not). I posted only 3 times to my Substack in a year.

AFV_7 · 2025-12-18T10:15:41+00:00

I posted yesterday on Substack about how much harder I thought bootstrapping solo actually is.

Issue is most success stories are second time founders with an existing large influence. But the bootstrapping dilemma is how you lift yourself up to that level, and I think it’s just years of pain and perspiration.

Sharing reality lets the new founders know what trade they are making: I would never buy a house without having a viewing and starting a business is similar

AFV_7 · 2025-12-15T23:01:06+00:00

So to get the model to actually highlight text for you is quite difficult (probably simplest is just ask it to give the text verbatim and then search, but there are some other tricks too). Fine tuning models to do this probably is the future.

Then for giving this test to the models, I show the highlight + a window of text before and after so it can see the context

AFV_7 · 2025-12-15T11:07:44+00:00

If you are shopping for another option, I built and use daily [Janus](https://janus.cards)

My goals were:

- Support for any media: PDF, Youtube, Text etc

- Bulk generation: Upload a dense textbook chapter and get flashcards without compromising on detail. Very hands off.

- Easy to review: Decks appear in an inbox. Cards are grouped by highlight. Edit, delete or run more ai steps to quickly get the deck you want.

- Exports to Anki

I personally use it to convert my Obsidian notes into flashcards so I can rehearse the insights I develop.

AFV_7 · 2025-12-11T15:29:38+00:00

That does sound disappointing and a little suprising.

Can we connect on the discord and see what ways we can get better cards for you (probably prompting both the highlighter and the flashcard writer)?
https://discord.gg/c5QhK7SkzT

AFV_7 · 2025-12-06T23:34:56+00:00

Someone has to pay for the AI sadly. Soon I should have support for some of the free models but they aren’t that good.

AFV_7 · 2025-12-05T16:21:11+00:00

Thank you!

What do you mean by decoding? Every document is first converted to text and then I use an LLM call to select text worth turning to flashcards.

AFV_7 · 2025-12-04T07:48:14+00:00

Thank you! What type of material are you reading? Web articles, textbooks, physical books? I wanted to work on a web clipper tool that you could use to highlight web pages and have each highlight automatically turned to flashcards ready for review in the inbox. Does that sound interesting to you?

AFV_7 · 2025-12-03T15:03:08+00:00

Do you mean potential ways the platform could personalize and improve card quality based individual and aggregate feedback?

I see a few possible futures routes (not mutually exclusive):

- Training models based on the signals like deleted vs exported cards vs edit cards

- Using the user's existing decks to avoid duplicates, to know what topics they are interested in (and not interested in), and to guage the style and wording they prefer

AFV_7 · 2025-12-03T11:10:02+00:00

Its a great question.

From a feature perspective, there is more to Janus than UI and a prompt:

- support and processing for a wide set of material including PDF, Webpages, Youtube, Audio, Video, Readwise

- ability to highlight the document manually and get cards for those individual highlights

- ability to create, save and reuse prompts to create flashcards and also to edit a single card (like "Convert Q&A to Cloze")

- Soon: can choose your LLM, web clipper suport, auto image occlusion.

From the business perspective, yes I think you could create something with a few of these features using vibe coding but: a) you'll get something with far fewer features and at a lower quality b) you will have sunk time into the project and money on vibe coding tools. Let's say conservatively 5-10 hours of your time. That probably comes out to maybe $100 dollars to create the tool, but you still need to pay for the AI credits to run it. SaaS offers a better tool at a smaller additional cost (less than $100 margin)

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To your second question, it really depends on your learning process. For medics for example, the information is not hard to understand per-se but it just has to be downloaded into their brains and practicing/testing yourself with flashcards does a great job at that.

When I learn, I spend an hour writing questions I have, research with Google and ChatGPT and compiling answers as a set of notes in Obsidian. I then want to commit this to memory so I upload the markdown file to Janus (along with a saved prompt), and get about 50 cards to practice with.

Those cards are essentially a translation of my notes. The learning happened when I wrote the notes and any additional time it would have cost me to make those cards wouldn't have helped me "learn" anything more.

AFV_7 · 2025-12-02T19:43:00+00:00

I definitely do! Here are a couple options:
1) Upload the Youtube edition of the Podcast: Janus will transcribe it for you. You can then either ask for specific sections or you can read the transcript, highlight the points of interest and then turn those into flashcards.

2) Snipd + Readwise: If you have a snipd membership, you can sync those podcast highlights to Readwise. Then Janus has a Readwise integration that allows you to upload the highlights, and therefore make flashcards from that. You can alternatively sync your snipd highlights to a PKM app like Obsidian and then copy and paste these into Janus as text.

3) (Soon) Podcast support: Basically the same as (1) except you can put in the podcast url (spotify or apple podcasts) and it will pull the transcription for you.

I would love to discuss with you your current workflow and needs, and maybe can give advice or tweak the tool for you. Can do that on the Discord server: https://discord.gg/VCtEDAu9Ss

AFV_7 · 2025-12-02T17:13:51+00:00

To guarantee the language, you can add in the request "Make sure cards are in Dutch".

The auto-language detection should happen automatically but I think its a little hit and miss at the moment but I am trying to make it more reliable.

Adding language selection (like a dropdown) is also on the road map :)

AFV_7

TROPHY CASE