Bottsy, a small line-drawn robot reading a book
In active development · a personal tool first

Your notes become a question bank.

Bottsy reads the Obsidian notes you already keep and turns the facts you tag into Bitts — real exam questions and atomic flashcards that stay linked to the note they came from, are checked before they reach you, and arrive on a spaced-repetition schedule.

The Bottsy home screen: the reading-robot mascot above a single Study now button, with a scope card showing study modes (due, fresh, redo wrong, review all) and Bitt types

The app as it runs today · one button, and whatever is due

Real Bitts from the maker’s own deck

Q&A What is the order of the meninges from innermost to outermost? Cloze In the PICO(T) research-question framework, the elements are , Intervention, Comparison, Outcome and Time. Q&A For which age group is guanfacine licensed in the treatment of ADHD? Q&A What does the tentorium cerebelli separate?
The loop

From note to question bank in four steps

Your vault is the source of truth. Bottsy reads it and never rewrites your notes — the words stay exactly as you wrote them.

01

Tag a fact

Add a small marker to any note — <!-- bottsy: flashcard --> — for a flashcard, cloze, diagram or exam question. It hides inside a comment; your prose is untouched.

02

Review the proposal

A sync check proposes new Bitts from what you tagged, each with an advisory AI quality note. Nothing enters your deck until you approve it, and a safety copy of the database is taken first.

03

Study what is due

Press Study now. The scheduler serves whatever is due, and new Bitts graduate through short learning steps. Answer by clicking, typing or speaking.

04

Keep the bank honest

Flag a weak Bitt mid-study and the quality system takes it from there — audits, reviews, and new audit rules learned from your feedback.

Exam questions

Questions a flashcard app cannot ask

Five options, one single best answer, in the style of MRCPsych and MRCP papers. This is the part word-flip flashcard tools have no concept of.

  • A proper clinical vignette — a patient, a decision, a reason to think.
  • Five plausible options. An implausible distractor is treated as a quality failure, not a freebie.
  • A first-principles explanation that argues why the right answer is right — not one that just restates it.
  • Approved by you before it counts. Vault questions are hand-approved and stored verbatim; where you want more, Bottsy can generate them with your own Anthropic key.
A Bottsy exam question: a clinical vignette about deep brain stimulation for treatment-refractory OCD, five options A to E, and a first-principles explanation of the correct answer

Question 22 of the maker’s deck, exactly as the app renders it

Provenance

Every Bitt knows the note it came from

Cards are not orphans in a deck. Each one carries the identity of the note that made it, and the link survives edits, renames and moves.

  • The note, on the card. Open the source note from any question — or jump straight into Obsidian.
  • Coverage you can see. Each note page shows how much of what you tagged has become Bitts, and what could still become one.
  • Confidence from evidence. Built from your actual review history, not self-rating.
The From your note panel on a question page, showing the source note Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) with its sections and links to open the full note or open it in Obsidian
A Library note page for Core Neuroanatomy for Psychiatry: 12 Bitts, tags, coverage of 12 out of 13 tagged items, and a confidence bar at 64 per cent
Flashcards

Atomic by rule, not by discipline

One fact per card is a rule the system enforces, not advice it hopes you follow.

  • Hard word limits. Question-and-answer cards are capped at 25 words; cloze blanks are shorter still.
  • Cloze where it matters. Drug names, doses, percentages and diagnostic thresholds become fill-in-the-blank cards as a matter of policy.
  • Recall kept honest. The back of a card stays blurred until you commit — hover or focus to reveal.
A cloze flashcard about the PICO(T) research-question framework with one element blanked out, its back blurred with the caption hover or focus to reveal the back
A note's flashcard list showing four card fronts with their due state and a confidence bar for each
Quality

Checked before you ever study it

Generated content can be wrong, and even your own cards age. Bottsy treats checking as a first-class feature — a card earns its place in your deck.

Stage 1

Advisory AI review

Every Bitt proposed from your vault gets an advisory quality note at proposal time — weak distractors, giveaway fronts, multi-fact cards.

Stage 2

Your approval

Propose, then promote. You review the proposal and decide what enters the deck; nothing is added behind your back.

Stage 3

Mechanical audit

Deterministic rule checks on every Bitt — option counts, answer letters, duplicates, missing explanations. Free, instant, and never wrong.

Stage 4

Rules learned from you

Flag a Bitt and the reason can become a new audit rule, so the same weakness is caught automatically from then on.

The mechanical audit panel: rule checks over the whole deck, with 24 flashcards checked, 15 passed and 9 issues itemised, and 3 questions checked with 0 issues

The audit, run against the maker’s deck · findings are itemised, not hidden

Progress

Evidence, not encouragement

Bottsy runs standard SM-2 spaced repetition with two short learning steps. No streaks, no badges, no mystery algorithm — and no “great job!”.

  • Position, stated plainly. Coverage and confidence per note, computed from your actual attempts.
  • A due forecast, so next week’s workload is visible before it lands.
  • Struggling cards return in minutes; known cards retreat to expanding intervals.
The Insights position panel: 47 of 91 Bitts covered, overall confidence 31 per cent, 15 due now, and a per-note list with coverage counts and confidence bars

Insights · the numbers as they stand, including the unflattering ones

Say it out loud

Answer by voice and Whisper transcribes you; have questions read aloud with ElevenLabs. A viva practice mode asks one open question at a time and marks what you covered and what you missed. All of it is off by default, opt-in per session — and every workflow has a full text-only path.

Local-first, by design

Runs on your machine — one local database No accounts, no cloud, no telemetry Your own API keys, encrypted at rest Deletion is always reversible
Two words we made up

A small lexicon

Bottsy has exactly two pieces of jargon, and both are load-bearing.

Bittnoun

One piece of study material — a single exam question, flashcard, cloze or diagram. Every Bitt traces back to where it came from.

Settnoun

A combination of notes and tags you revise as one — an exam block, say — with its own coverage and confidence figures.

Who it’s for

Built by a doctor who studies this way

Active recall and spaced repetition have a stronger evidence base than almost any other way to study. The limitation has never been the method — it is that question banks only cover what someone else chose to write.

Bottsy is made by a UK psychiatry doctor, working from the notes he already keeps: the exam material, and everything the banks never reach — the specialty interest that came from a paper, the guideline worth understanding from first principles.

Bottsy is in active development.

It is a personal tool first, in daily use by the person making it. If the way it works matches the way you study, say hello and we’ll keep you posted.

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