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The core engine of Janus is the flashcard writer that creates flashcards for a single highlight/snippet. The writer has to solve the following problems:
  • Content Selection: What should the cards specifically test?
  • Phrasing: How should the information be broken down and expressed to best test you?
  • Formatting: What should the cards look like?
Through prompting (and further customization soon), you can guide exactly how the writer thinks about making your flashcards.

Prompting

The writer is governed by the following parameters:
  • User Prompt: Prompts submitted by you in the Generate or Highlight tabs.
  • Best Practices: A comprehensive document outlining what “good” and effective flashcards look like, and how to create them. There will soon be support for you to specify your own best practices
The user prompt takes priority over best practices and allows you to give very specific instructions for what you want. Here are some examples:
Turn this quote into a cloze card. There should be multiple deletions, each about 3-4 words long, that partition the quote fully. Then, if you know the name of the author and/or the book add these names to the end of the quote like: ”- Meditations, Marcus Aurelius”
Turn this vocab word into a Q&A card. The front side should have just the word. The back side should have the definition, the part of speech and then an example in a sentence.
You will soon be able to save and reuse prompts.

Writing Tasks

The same algorithm is used in multiple contexts. Below, you can find the tasks along with the user prompt.
TaskUser Prompt
Generating new or additional flashcards for a single highlight in highlights tab or document reader. Prompt you input
Requesting to change or improve your flashcards for a single highlight Prompt you input
Running an edit command Refinement prompt
Called by the Highlighter after running the Generator Part of the prompt you input. The highlighter determines which parts of the original prompt are relevant for that particular highlight, and uses that.
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