Kirkby and Matuschak on making flashcards with LLMs

Here are Ozzie Kirkby and Andy Matuschak reporting on their attempts to make LLMs make and evaluate good flashcards based on their reading notes. It's both well-written1 and relevant. They work with good ideas of how flashcards ought to be written, or at least ideas that are close to mine. Some notes:2 This is what it looks like when the authors actually care about the thing they're studying: diversity of approach, creativity, and tenacity. I evaluate this whole genre of essay on a spectrum from "really care about figuring this out" to "trying to get an A from some real or imagined teaching assistant." This is very much on the good side. The project of fully automating the highlight-to-card process via LLM is, to me, undermotivated. The larger pipeline here includes reading, highlighting, thinking, card composition, and intermittent study. Given that, I'm not so worried that, e.g., "even the strongest model we tested (GPT-5.2) still produces unusable prompts roughly a third of the…