nodes is a spaced repetition app that notices when two things you're learning are quietly fighting each other — and says so, before it costs you a month.
A small first group. Bring a deck you've been fighting with.
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On the list. You'll get one message when your invite is ready — nothing before that.
You already know spaced repetition works. What breaks isn't the algorithm — it's the twenty cards you keep failing and can't explain. Most apps count those failures. A few flag them. None of them tell you why.
So the number grows, and opening the app starts to feel like opening a bill.
There are fixes for some of this. They live in add-ons most people never hear about, and the people who do hear about them lose an evening wiring things together — then another evening after the next update breaks it.
nodes indexes your collection on your own device — by meaning, not by matching words. Write a new card and it tells you how many similar ones you already have, before you add the twenty-first way of asking the same thing. On any card, Related opens the cluster it belongs to and lets you walk it.
Most stubborn cards aren't hard. They're a pair you can't tell apart yet.
Come back to four hundred overdue cards and nodes spreads them forward at whatever daily pace you set, keeping the ones closest to being forgotten at the front. One button, and you can undo it. Or leave it on and it happens quietly at the start of every session.
Study in timed blocks with breaks that resume on their own, or in chunks of a set number of cards with a checkpoint between them. The deck tells you how long it's going to take before you start, so you know what you're agreeing to.
Cap reviews on the days you'll be away — specific dates, or every Saturday, or both weekend days at once. Before you commit, nodes estimates how many extra lapses the cap will actually cost. You get to choose instead of hoping.
All of it is just how the app works — nothing to install, nothing to configure, nothing that stops working in March. There's card generation too, but the part worth mentioning is that it refuses: cards that are ambiguous, self-answering or barely supported by your source get held back, with a reason you can read.
Every card starts as a loose node. As you add more, nodes draws the edges — what depends on what, what collides with what, what you already had.
You don't build the graph. You keep making cards, and it assembles underneath you.
I started a CS degree in my third year of medicine and have been doing both at once since. Flashcards are the only reason that worked — years of Anki, thousands of cards, through anatomy and pharmacology and data structures.
Somewhere in there I stopped being able to ignore what it couldn't do. Not the scheduling, which is good. The part where it tells you a card is a problem and then hands the problem back to you.
nodes is the version I wanted: the good parts already in it, kept working, and a few things nothing else does yet.
It's early. Some of this is rough. The scheduling isn't.
Bring your .apkg — cards, review history, media, cloze, your deck hierarchy and its options come across with it. Import into a deck you already have and it merges rather than duplicating. Nothing you've built is left behind, and nothing about this is a one-way door.
No launch emails, no newsletter. One message when your invite is ready.
That didn't go through. Try again in a moment.
On the list. You'll get one message when your invite is ready — nothing before that.