How I Use Claude Code + Anki to Memorize Anything (My Agentic Learning System)
Claude Code + Anki for memorization — an agentic learning system.
Automata Learning Lab (an AI engineer and instructor) pairs Anki spaced-repetition with Claude Code agents to remove the friction of “Anki-fying” anything you read or watch.
Key Points
- Anki is the memory backbone. An open-source flashcard app that automates review timing via a spaced-repetition algorithm. Inspiration comes from Michael Nielsen’s Augmenting Long-Term Memory — the idea that memory can be a choice. The catch: the card-creation process is normally tedious and full of context-switching friction.
- Claude Code amplifies the workflow. Anthropic’s terminal agent lets you offload the boring parts of card creation (formatting, importing, gap-hunting) without offloading the actual learning.
- Paper workflow: quiz first, card second. Claude Code turns a PDF into a vibe-coded HTML quiz app; you take the quiz to reveal what you didn’t retain, then feed the misses back to generate cards — in an Anki-importable format, or directly into your Anki database via a custom skill.
- YouTube workflow: transcript + timestamped extracts. A short Python script pulls transcripts; a Claude Code slash-command extracts just the sections you care about with clickable timestamps, so each card’s source links to the exact moment in the video.
- Free alternatives exist. Gemini can summarize YouTube videos with clickable timestamps for free (NotebookLM similar), but the links don’t survive copy-paste — the output isn’t reusable, which pushes him toward Claude Code + Obsidian.
- Obsidian as the “brain OS.” Extracted, linked notes land in Obsidian, giving a knowledge layer where writing naturally pulls from specific video moments. The result is a repeatable system, not a one-off trick.
Note
This is one of several approaches the channel covers; a paid course bundles the prompts, folders, and source materials if you want the full setup.