Show HN: Sanctum – An LLM-Guided Learning App
It's in an infant stage as I figure out exactly how I want this.
In a more marketing speech style,
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I love learning things and soaking in information, but I constantly run into 3 ergonomic problems with doing so:
- Quality study materials are often so dense as to require an extended session of focus
- Ergonomic study materials require too much work to find + aren't always flexible to what I want to learn/study
- Social media feeds have rotted my UI tastes to prefer short-form, transient interfaces that build familiarity with repeated, intermittent exposure
So, I'm making a flashcard app to address these points. In short,
- Reference-based deck generation
- LLMs are great, but human sources are always best.
- Give it a PDF or web page, and it'll reference that resource in creating your deck
- AI-powered grading
- The vector math powering LLMs allows for much more loosely structured answer grading than just naive keyword matching.
- Know the concept, but can't phrase it in the colloquial terms? Don't worry, phrase it as best you can and it can tell how well you get the idea.
- Natural deck progression
- If you've been performing well enough on a deck, take a quiz to see if you're ready to expand the flashcards in your study.
There are a few things I still am looking to iron out:
- I don't think flashcards are the optimal UI for learning
- They're great for memorizing + I do think improving pattern-matching is essentially learning is, but I don't think flashcards are the most optimal vehicle for meaningful learning
- i.e., Life is more than just trivia
- Right now, you take a quiz to expand the deck along the same lines as the existing subject matter. I think this is okay at best and could very much be improved.
- One of the ideas I had initially around this is that LLMs can be used to traverse the embedding space of accumulated knowledge in a way that subverts/transcends the traditional academic taxonomization of studies.
- i.e., I think UI is the bottleneck in soaking in more information/ideas. I think LLMs do well enough in pattern-matching requests to information that they could act as librarians for the internet--then, it's just a matter of scrunching down the information into more convenient interfaces (e.g., mobile).
- The name--far too esoteric
This is an active WIP--would love to hear what you all think.
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