But the very act of making and organizing your card deck is part of the SRS! It “sucks” because you get no dopamine hit from a fresh desk, as the reward system is not yet in place.
I'm willing to grant that there is some value in choosing what to put in the cards, but most of the awkwardness around making cards is UI related. Nobody creates cards on their phone, or while they're walking (AI could do both of these) - people create cards sitting at their computer (like cavemen!) usually clicking through a clunky UI and managing thousands of cards with thousands of clicks. That sucks, and people probably wont realize it sucks until something better comes along.
Wait, when are you doing it then? No wonder you think it sucks! Adopt some modern tools, yo. Use Anki, or vibe code your own app.
Anki is great for studying, but the card creation experience sucks. To be specific: I found creating any custom card type immediately dropped me into the bowels of CSS. It felt like writing HTML by hand.
Is there any facility for re-using shared pieces?
I felt like it needed a static site generator type tool to move up a layer of abstraction and reduce the copying of chunks into my card. Is there one? Please mention if so.
Using that as the input file format standard, AI can generate what you're looking for, Android app, Webapp, iOS app, pdf.
Ah, LaTeX syndrome.
I use an Emacs based SRS tool. I have a capture template to quickly make a card.
For anything tedious, it's critical to reduce the friction!
Just to pick your brain real fast, when creating new cards (from scratch?) what would a better experience look like for you?