How to make Anki cards, and whether you still need to
Making good Anki cards is harder than it looks. Here is what tends to work, what wastes time, and why many people now start from AI-generated drafts instead of blank cards.
Ethan ColeAI Study Workflow EditorUpdated 2026-05-25
Quick Answer
Good Anki cards usually follow one rule: one fact per card. The question should be specific enough to have one clear answer, and the answer should be short enough to recall quickly. The hard part is not knowing this rule. It is having enough time to build the deck that way.
A hormone involved in the stress response and metabolism (200 words)
Scope
One fact: the cortisol-blood sugar relationship
Everything about cortisol on one card
Primary brand
SocriFlow
Category
An iPhone-first AI study workflow, not a generic chat app.
Inputs
PDFs, web pages, images, text, and audio sources.
Outputs
Podcast lessons, flashcards, mind maps, reports, insight cards, and guided review.
How we tested this
How we tested this
Page design based on study habits around PDFs, papers, and class materials.
Start by asking whether the source is worth going back to.
Check whether the output can become flashcards, audio, maps, or guided review.
Keep only the structure that makes the source easy to pick back up.
Not every source should become audio or flashcards first.
These pages are study-workflow pages, not general AI tool directories.
The setup overhead is the real barrier
Anki itself is not the hard part. Making enough good cards is. Writing hundreds of cards from a semester of material by hand takes longer than most students can spare, so the finished decks are either tiny or overloaded.
What makes a card worth making
A card is worth making when forgetting that fact would hurt you later. Maybe it costs you a point on an exam, maybe it breaks a clinical decision, maybe it leaves you blank in discussion. If a fact is not worth recalling under pressure, it usually is not worth reviewing for weeks.
AI cards as a starting point
AI-generated cards are not magic, but they are often better than staring at a blank deck. If a tool can pull 200 first-draft cards from your PDF, you can spend your time trimming, rewriting, and merging instead of authoring everything from zero. That is usually the difference between a deck you finish and a deck you abandon.
What SocriFlow does better
What SocriFlow does better
Best fit
People who do their second-pass studying on iPhone.
People who want one source to branch into audio, flashcards, maps, and guided review.
People who expect to reopen the material, not just skim one summary and move on.
Not the best fit
People who only want a general-purpose chat window.
People who prefer to do nearly all of their studying inside a browser notebook.
People who only need a quick rewrite and do not plan to return to the source.
Use AI to generate the first draft from your notes or PDF. Edit the cards that are too broad or test the wrong thing. The editing pass takes minutes; authoring from scratch takes hours.
How many Anki cards should I make per chapter?
Enough to test every concept you'd be expected to apply. That's usually 20 to 60 for a dense chapter, not hundreds.
What is the minimum information principle?
Each card should test exactly one thing. The less you put on a card, the more precisely you can recall it.
Should I make cards or use pre-made decks?
Cards you make from your own source material encode the content more deeply than cards someone else made. But editing AI-generated cards from your own source is nearly as good and much faster.
Is Anki worth the setup time?
For material you need to retain for months or years, yes. For a single exam, a simpler flashcard app without the setup cost might be a better fit.
