How FeynmanFSRS works

The loop

1. A card's front is a prompt: “Explain comparative advantage.” Write your explanation from scratch, or hit 🎤 and say it out loud — explaining aloud is the original Feynman move.
2. Flip. You see your explanation next to the reference answer and its key-points checklist — the three to five things a complete explanation must contain.
3. Tick what you actually covered, then grade yourself. The checklist is what keeps self-grading honest: the question is “did I hit these points”, never “did that feel good”.
4. FSRS schedules the next review for right around when your understanding is predicted to fray. Every explanation you write is saved to the card's history timeline — over months you can watch yourself get clearer, or catch yourself getting vaguer.

The four buttons

• Again — you missed the core of it. The card comes back within minutes.
• Hard — you got there, but slowly or with real gaps in the checklist.
• Good — you hit the key points. This is the normal grade; most reviews should be Good.
• Easy — effortless and complete. Use it sparingly; it pushes the card far out.

Keep decks small — this is by design

An explanation takes one to three minutes against five seconds for a flashcard. So this is a small-deck tool: the twenty to fifty core concepts of a course, not ten thousand vocabulary items. A healthy deck reviews in about fifteen minutes twice a week. Keep using Anki for facts — FeynmanFSRS sits next to it, for understanding.

Writing good cards

• Prompts start with Explain (or Why / How), one concept per card. “Explain comparative advantage”, not “Define comparative advantage”.
• The reference is the explanation you wish you'd write: short, plain language, intuition first. Markdown works.
• Key points are checkable claims, not vibes — “uses opportunity cost, not absolute cost”, not “understands the idea”.
• If AI generation is configured, it can draft the reference and checklist when you create a card — edit before saving. Grading stays yours; there is no AI in the review loop.

Around the loop

• Catch up (free) — came back to a pile of due cards? The deck page offers to spread them evenly over a few days. Only due dates move; scheduling stays honest.
• Study ahead (free) — nothing due but you have time? Bring the next few scheduled cards forward. Early reviews are honest: the scheduler works from the real gap since your last look.
• Focus (free) — a toggle on the review screen hides everything but the card.
• Exam mode (Pro) — set a test date on a deck and nothing schedules past it; the deck shows predicted recall on the day.
• Import from Anki (Pro, BETA) — bring an .apkg, pick up to 30 cards, and AI converts them into explanation cards you review before saving.
• Simulator (Pro) — Stats projects your next 90 days of workload and stable-knowledge growth from your real scheduling state.

The hub, and getting your data out

The hub is where decks are shared: publish a snapshot of a deck (prompts, references, key points — never your history), copy other people's decks with fresh scheduling, and leave comments under your username. And your data is never held hostage: every deck exports as JSON (full fidelity, history included), Markdown, or CSV from its deck page — everything at once from settings.