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Comment by dsiegel2275 | Hacker News Reader

I have it installed on an extra macbook pro that I had available. I'm really only using it at the moment for one use case:

Nightly, I have OpenClaw pull the latest changes from a private GitHub repo that is my Obsidian notes vault. It then looks to see which new notes have been added and then runs a "create flashcard" skill to extract and author useful flashcards for spaced-repetition practice. I then gave it access to a custom web-based spaced-repetition flash card application that I built a few months ago. It uses an API to insert new cards, check to see when I last reviewed cards and optionally send me a nudge reminder if I haven't reviewed cards in a few days.

It is a nice workflow that has been working well. I go to class, take notes in Obsidian and check in my changes. By the next day, when I open my flashcard app on my phone, I have new cards to review from yesterday's class.

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You should ask claude code to write a bash script that does this for you. Then run that as a Cronjob every night. You might not need any inference at all to create the flash cards so it would be free.

> ...useful flashcards...

How would the script do that without inference from free format md files?

Script can still run LLM inference

Why not use Claude one single time to create a service that does this? I have this same question with 90% of the 'simple' use cases I see for these task runners, it always seems more efficient (not to mention consistent) to have it generate the service.

Im curious can't your use case be done with Github self hosted runner ?

Or, like, a cron job.

>scripting and automation

I cringe at my old boss’s handiwork in Claude and power automate sometimes and go “you know I could just do that in a script and a cron job and it would be completely bullet proof, right?”

Then he just shoots back with, “yeah but now I don’t have to ask you.”

This is my kludge, there are many others like it but this one is mine.

Does the boss not understand that they could get Claude to write them a script and a crontab entry (so they don't have to ask you) -- and then run it forever (so they don't have to pay Anthropic, or risk temperature randomness)? Best of both worlds...

Boss might not even know what Bash is, let alone a crontab.

crontab yes, flavors of shell, no.

But I actually did appreciate the one time he handed me a Cisco config that was 90% perfect and took me all of 5 minutes to fix. Sometimes the three of us make a hell of a team.

You know that was a good answer.

What flashcard app are you using? Anki?

I use both actually. Anki for the reviews since the spaced repetition is hard to beat, but I use Norsha Notes (norshanotes.com) to generate the cards. You upload your notes or study material and it creates flashcards from them using AI, then you can export as .apkg and import straight into Anki. Saves a ton of time over making cards manually.

I had used Anki for a few years but recently migrated all my cards out of it and into a custom app I built just a few months ago. It is as an Elixir/Phoenix app with a simple UI but also with a rich API for Agent integration.

Any chance you might consider open sourcing this?

very cool :)

You should have it also review the cards too! /s

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