10 · Ask-Claude — the tutor

This is where the AI layer begins. Everything so far — drilling, scheduling, workspaces — runs entirely offline. From here on alix can call Claude, and the first place it does is the most useful: a tutor on any card.

(One reminder: every AI feature shells out to the Claude Code CLI, so it needs the CLI installed and logged in — see chapter 2. The flashcard core never calls it.)

Asking about a card

On any post-answer screen — a revealed flip card, the feedback after a typed answer, an answered choice — press ?. alix hands Claude the card (its front, answer, note, and deck name) as context, and you can ask “why is that the answer?”, “what’s a simpler way to see this?”, or anything else, and follow up. While Claude thinks the session stays responsive; Esc drops you back exactly where you were.

One conversation spans the whole review run (alix uses --session-id for the first question and --resume after), so Claude remembers the earlier cards and questions — you can ask how the current card relates to one from ten minutes ago, and it knows.

In the browser

It works in the web frontend (--serve) too: an Ask button (or the ? key) on an answered card opens a chat panel — type a question, Send, Save note, Close. The server runs claude -p on a background thread and the page polls for the reply, so the single-threaded server never blocks. Ask is available wherever you serve, including over --lan — but the request runs claude on the host machine, so, like --lan in general, only enable it on a network you trust.

Saving what you learn — Ctrl-N

When an exchange clears something up, press Ctrl-N: Claude condenses the conversation into at most three short note lines and appends them to the card in its deck file. Notes aren’t hashed, so the card’s progress is untouched — you just keep the insight. (In the web panel, Save note does the same.)

Reference links — % link:

A deck can point the tutor at background reading with % link: comment lines:

% link: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch04-01-what-is-ownership.html
% link: https://tokio.rs/tokio/tutorial

These are handed to Claude with your first question as material to consult when useful — fetched once and remembered for the rest of the run. They’re tutor-only: unlike % source: (the exam’s ground truth, covered next chapter), a % link: never becomes exam material. And like every directive, they don’t affect card hashes.

How it’s sandboxed

Because the CLI runs headless (claude -p), it can’t show interactive permission prompts — an unanswerable prompt would just hang the call. So alix runs it locked down: --permission-mode dontAsk plus an exclusive tool allowlist (WebFetch, WebSearch by default). The listed tools work without prompting; every other tool is silently denied. That means a malicious page behind a deck link can’t make the tutor run shell commands or touch your files. Both the permission mode and the allowlist live in the [ask] section of the config, along with the command, a --model override, and the timeout.