Developments in Application Prompts for Memory Systems

Published on • 2 min read

Andy Matuschak distinguishes two types of prompts: recall prompts and application prompts. Recall prompts are normal front-back/question-answer flashcards; application prompts involve explicitly *applying* information.

Here are some Claude generated examples to distinguish the two types of prompts:

Law
- Recall: Which courts can hear patent claims? → Only federal courts.
- Application: Acme sues Bolt for patent infringement. Both are Arizona companies, and the claim is for $2M. Which court can hear it? → Federal only. Patent claims are exclusively federal, even when both parties are local.

Meteorology

- Recall: What is the dewpoint? → The temperature air must cool to before it saturates.
- Application: 10 PM temp 52°F, dewpoint 50°F, clear sky, calm wind, forecast low 48°F. Fog on the valley floor by sunrise? → Yes. Clear and calm means strong radiational cooling, and the forecast low is below the dewpoint, so the air near the ground saturates.

Creating application prompts at scale required a full on enterprise like MathAcademy before AI. Now they are easy to generate with AI.

While both recall prompts and application prompts both have their place, I believe application prompts are pedagogically better, downstream of the fact that tacit knowledge triumphs over explicit knowledge. It feels like there may be a pretty dramatic overhang in how education could be improved if it was made more tacit rather than explicit. Though I'm not sure there is much demand for a better education system, it is fun to play around with this stuff on a personal basis.

I spent some time last weekend playing around with creating video games within Anki cards. I didn't even need Claude Code. Asking Claude to generate artifacts and then to turn them into APKGs worked fine. ChatGPT probably works well too.The games that worked best seemed to be WarioWare; Paper, Please (great game generally); Hitster. Also the street address one that Claude made up was pretty cool.

Some heuristics I learned:

  • Asking Claude to parody other games helped generate cards as games with a stepwise change in quality, to my memory.
  • I don't have a ton of interest in doing SRS for these prompts. But I do have occasional spontaneous desires to do them.
  • You can embed the prompts in Anki, and you can make them vertical so they can work on the phone.
  • Games are sometimes more fun to make than review, lmao.
  • I don't think doing well on these prompts transfers much to doing well on my school exams, but TBD haven't been doing them long enough.

Would be curious to hear if anyone else has been experimenting with application prompts. Even if your experience diverges dramatically from this I'd be curious to hear. It could be fun to do an event where we all play around with creating application prompts.

Here's a list of the games I created, hosted my Anki social media site cardpicnic.com:

Meteorology

Law

  • Clerk of Court — LES 210 (Papers, Please): card 1 · card 2
  • Clerk of Court — Intake Slips (Papers, Please): card 1 · card 2

Business

Geography

Case studies

Timelines (Hitster)

Comments? Ideas? Want to discuss further?

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