Yesterday I wrote a script to turn any highlighted text into flashcards inside of Anki. So: highlight text in any application, press a keyboard shortcut, and a few seconds later LLM-generated flashcards show up in Anki for later review.

I’m finding it pretty useful because I can quickly archive something I want to review or memorize without interrupting whatever I’m working on at the moment. Review that equation later? Store that fact? Test myself on this article tomorrow? This makes it fairly frictionless. (It also helps offload rabbit holes, nerdsnipes, and endless chrome tabs to an invisible “for-later” cognitive space.)

Are these going to be better than handwritten cards? Almost certainly not, since the act of writing the cards yourself is huge part of the process. But I think for a certain kind of task this has its place.

HERE’s the script and setup instructions if you’d like to try. The configuration for your desktop can be a little finicky.

The LLM prompt (a super-condensed Claude summary of Andy Matuschak’s article) is in a pretty good place but you’ll probably want to tweak it to your taste.