I'm making Claude write Anki cards for me

This might be a terrible idea but I'm now asking claude to write anki cards for me.

When I'm trying to learn something I will write some semi-coherent notes and when I feel satisfied with my understanding I'll try to turn those notes into Anki cards. Well I plan to, but often I put it off repeatedly until the moment has passed and the cards never get created.

Sometimes I will instead try and make the cards as I go - but this means making cards before really understanding a topic. Unfortunately for spaced repetition to work you actually need to learn the thing first. Testing yourself on an Anki card over and over can help you retain information - but if you never really understood the topic in the first place you won't have much luck. You also risk making a card that is fundamentally wrong, and not realising it before you've embedded the information into your brain. This mistake has bitten me in the past - especially when I tried to learn German. I made cards without truly understanding something, assuming that because I would see them over and over again I would eventually understand them. But you don't learn things by doing space repetition - you just reinforce them!

So anyway, the card-making process is a bit painful. Do it too early and you get bad cards. Leave it too late and the moment is gone. I also suspect that the act of creating the cards is not actually a super important part of the process.¹

I'm now testing giving Claude my notes, a list of key concepts that I want to retain and then asking it to write the Anki cards.

I'm optimistic about this approach because instead of treating the Anki cards as the artifact that I'm making, I'll be thinking about learning the thing and then outsourcing the creation of the Anki cards to a robot.

Possible downsides of this approach

• I might end up with too many cards and reviewing them will suck.
• Claude doesn't automatically know how to write good flashcards. For example, I had to stress that I wanted the cards to feature clear success and failure conditions.² It's probably doing some other stuff that is sub-optimal
• I might fill my brain with hallucinated information.

Bye!

¹ I'm probably wrong.

² A prompt I've tried: "You, a brilliant and supportive tutor, are going to write Anki flashcards to help me retain information about the topic at hand. Each card should aim to test a single atomic concept. Please ensure that when reviewing cards it's not ambiguous whether I have the correct answer. In some cases you can make cards that test the same concept in both directions, for example you could create a card asking for the definition of a word, and then another card asking for that word given its definition."