Table of contents

  1. I Built a Flashcard App in Go (And Learned Go, AI Prompting, and Spaced Repetition Along the Way)
  2. The Plan
  3. The Outcome
  4. The Learnings
I Built a Flashcard App in Go (And Learned Go, AI Prompting, and Spaced Repetition Along the Way) I Built a Flashcard App in Go (And Learned Go, AI Prompting, and Spaced Repetition Along the Way)

I Built a Flashcard App in Go (And Learned Go, AI Prompting, and Spaced Repetition Along the Way)

May 26, 2025 / 3 minutes to read / Tags: go, backend

The other day, I was discussing CAP Theorem with a friend of mine as part of a co-interview-prep planning. During this discussion, I realized that I’m just terrible at remembering stuff. So I went looking for a solution, and to my surprise there was a time tested way to memorize concepts called Flash Cards.

Now the issue with flashcards and the solutions I found in the online wildlands is that the cards have to be created by you (I’m too lazy to do that). Then came the spaced repetition aspect, where I found the SM-2 algorithm, but how am I to grade myself (More about the SM-2 in a later blog)?

In came AI. I could specify the correct answer, give my answer, and let an LLM grade me. With the problem statement firmly established, a plan was forged.

The Plan

  1. Learn a new language: Why did I choose this? In hindsight this project would’ve been so much easier if I had stuck to python, but then again easy is never fun. I’ve been looking at learning Golang for a while now, so I thought let’s drop in the deepend and see if I can swim to a shore.
  2. Implement a TUI (I like them TUIs a lot): Given an option between GUI and terminal, I like terminal, almost always and exclusively always, so TUI was a simple choice.
  3. Do the AI: I hadn’t worked on AI prompts before, turns out when you’re interacting with LLMs, prompts you must, hence prompt engineering you shall. It was like reading the mind of a 5 year old, and correcting it till it does the thing you wanted, and I have to admit, it was humbling.

The Outcome

Out came goflash — a flashcard application which helps with spaced repetition. I deliberately kept it open ended so that I can use the same app to learn other topics later (I’m planning history next, don’t ask why).

This is a TUI app written in Golang which uses AI to grade and SM-2 algorithm for spaced repetition and doesn’t ask you to self-grade and helps you focus on the learning flow instead.

The Learnings

  1. “GoLang is easy” is a myth, especially if you’re coming from a Python background.
  2. Go’s Channels are genuinely a headscratcher, and I’m still not super confident about it.
  3. Go’s packages are an absolute treat and overkill in simpler implementations at the same time. I love the opinionated approach it takes, because it definitely helped me with the project structure.
  4. Prompts are hard and require a lot of manual verification, and prompts need to be verified with different data sizes and types before you start writing code based on their output. Learnt that the hard way.

With the V0 complete, I’ll be working on a few more Vs to make the project easier to extend. The next few blogs will build on the V0 of this project, hope I got you hooked enough to want to read the next one.

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