michael dot piazza dot mp at gmail
- Making almost exactly $500/mo on an Anki extension that embeds AI / text to speech / image gen deeply into the app, allowing you to generate example sentences, audio, explanations, etc, for whatever you’re studying, in bulk.
Still holding off on the show HN post for now; have a few more features and QoL things I’d like to add first.
It’s been an enormously gratifying project and I hear from users all around the world who have feature requests for their specific use cases. Easily the most fun I’ve had working on a project.
- I do this, but it’s an Apple Notes file with a quick open shortcut mapped to the action button (side button) on my iPhone.
I finally figured this setup this year. It had changed my life, in a minor yet significant way.
(I also link to other relevant text files at the top of the doc)
- How is doomscrolling profitable for Apple?
Frankly I think it’s the opposite - Apple is one of the only BigCo without an advertising based biz model. Unlike say Meta, Apple didn’t profit directly from increased engagement with your iPhone (at least to a sizable extent), they profit when you purchase a new device. This alignment of incentives is what allows Apple to at least marginally prioritize user privacy in a way Meta/ Google just structurally cannot.
Happy to be corrected though, of course :)
- You’re decreasing coupling at the cost of introducing more entities, and a different sort of complexity, into your system.
Sometimes it’s absolutely worth it. Sometimes not.
- I can’t explain why but “He’s assigning 128 to a string called Q” made me absolutely lose it.
- This is good to know. I’ll probably play around with it sometime in the future.
BTW, appreciate your many great write-ups - they’ve been invaluable for keeping up to date in this space.
- Such a useful walkthrough.
It looks like Mitchell is using an agentic framework called Amp (I’d never heard of it) - does anybody else here use it or tried it? Curious how it stacks up against Claude Code.
- Shameless plug for anybody who has been through the hell that is Anki card creation for language learning - I built an LLM powered extension for Anki that allows you to wire up fields to arbitrary prompts, and then generate notes in batch (or selectively per field). I use it every day for generating example sentences, definitions, and TTS. Would have quit Anki ages ago without this.
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1531888719
FWIW I did get a lot more mileage from building my own deck vs a custom deck too, would recommend that approach regardless once you're past the initial vocab bootstrapping phrase.
- > Another visitor was spending a leisurely week in Morioka alone before heading to Fukuoka for a few months.
Oh hey, that was me! Small (internet) world, huh :)
- > Do a bunch of other things
Curious about this! Currently trying to figure out a good 0.3mg melatonin dosing regimine for myself.
- Thank you :) And, sounds like great fun. Shoot me an email (in bio) or let me know how best to get in touch.
- Wow, so feature rich, congrats on the release. Love that the mnemonic generation takes into account your existing memory anchors (didn’t know that term).
I’ve actually been working on a similar-ish Anki Plugin for about 6 months - it can autogenerate any field via LLM in bulk, as well as images and TTS. I’m not explicitly targeting the med school use case as much yours (I use it for language learning), and it’s more GUI centric/geared towards non-technical Anki users who don’t want to fiddle with a bunch of different API keys etc. Was planning to launch HN soon but you beat me to the punch!
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1531888719 https://smart-notes.xyz
- I would suggest building something that you yourself find useful / solving a problem that you regularly face that doesn’t have a satisfactory off the shelf solution.
Note that this implies spending time in a different problem domain than just programming all day (alternately read as: have a hobby or two).
I finally have a side project with traction & paying users and it’s because sheer frustration drove me to improve an inefficient workflow in my language learning process (hobby), which turned out to not be such a unique problem at the end of the day.
(Not to shill - I was a frustrated Anki user and built this to improve my own life: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1531888719 )
- That would be really cool. Unfortunately there's not much you can do on mobile with Anki extensions, so what you've described would have to be a standalone app. You could definitely wire up TTS fields with this add-on, but you'd still have to manually rate your answer.
- Same! There was another add-on that sort of did it, but it was broken with modern versions of Anki. Was very surprised nobody built this yet.
- I’m working on an Anki Addon that streamlines the hell out of the card generation process using LLMs. You can define a schema of prompts for your note type & fields, where each prompt can reference other fields, and use it to generate things like translations, example sentences, mnemonics, for tens of thousands of cards in batches or in the fly as they’re reviewed. These generated fields can reference other generated fields so it’s actually a fully fledged DAG under the hood! It also supports TTS in 50+ languages. Soon adding image generation support.
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1531888719
It’s a paid service at $5/mo with a free trial. Just cracked $50/MRR! Baby steps, but the value is clearly there. Need to tighten up a couple things, especially the web presence and onboarding, before I start marketing more. The tragic irony is that I’m spending all my language learning time building this (alas there can be no other way).
- This is great, going to try this approach with my Japanese Anki reps.
Mind linking out to Katzumoto’s Anki advice? Is this this one? https://tatsumoto-ren.github.io/blog/setting-up-anki.html
- You sound like me (unfortunately).
Did you ever find anything that helped?
- sincerely hoping this is satire
Almost all of my customers so far have been directly from the central Anki plugin directory. I made sure to use lots of SEO friendly terms / buzzwords in the title so that when people ctrl+f for AI or ChatGPT, they find mine.
My next steps I think are to better incentivize leaving reviews so that it ranks higher on the add-on list, and then launch it on various language learning subreddits. There’s a whole cottage industry of Anki influencers on YouTube as well (absurd, I know), so that’s another channel eventually.