Show HN: Reasonote, Open-Source AI-Generated Courses, Lessons, and Podcasts
by marviel | 2025-05-06 23:07:33+00:00
Hi HN! Luke, founder of Reasonote, an Education Tool that makes personalized AI-Generated Courses, Lessons, and Podcasts.

Today we’re making it Open Source :)

Try it now: https://reasonote.com/app

Github: https://github.com/Reasonote/reasonote

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The Problem We're Solving

Education today suffers from two issues:

1. Traditional education uses a "one-size-fits-none" approach that ignores individual learning needs

2. Most edtech is still linear, impersonal, and doesn't adapt to student goals or interests

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How Reasonote Works

Reasonote solves these problems by creating personalized AI-Generated interactive courses — including Skill Trees, Lessons, Activities, Feedback, Assistance and Interactive Podcasts — to scaffold the process of understanding.

There are a few key ideas that make Reasonote unique. Some of them:

1. Fully Generative, Grounded In Sources: Unlike other edtech platforms that rely on pre-written content, every aspect of Reasonote's learning experience is generated by AI, while staying grounded in your source material. The AI adapts the content and difficulty based on your goals, creating an individualized learning journey that evolves with you while ensuring accuracy.

2. Skill Tree & DAG SRS Algorithm: Unlike Anki, Duolingo, or Quizlet — we map prerequisite relationships between concepts (as a Directed Acyclic Graph) and combine this with spaced repetition. This means you'll learn concepts in-order, and when you’re ready. For instance — you’ll learn the concept of velocity before the concept of acceleration, because our system knows it's a prerequisite and you're prepared.

3. AI-Generated Activity Abstraction: We've gone beyond basic flashcards to prevent "overfitting" in learning. Our system generates eight different activity types (roleplay, sequencing, term-matching, etc.) that move past memorization to ensure deeper conceptual understanding. Developers can create new activity types by specifying three components: a generator (TS), a renderer (React), and a grader (TS). Each component has access to AI calls to make the experience as interactive as-is desired.

Imagine uploading an ML paper. Reasonote would analyze it, build a skill tree of concepts (from basic stats to neural nets), create interactive lessons, and generate activities that test both understanding and application. You might find yourself in a roleplay activity explaining backpropagation to a “fellow student”, or sequencing the steps of gradient descent. As you progress, the system adapts based on your performance, ensuring you're neither bored nor overwhelmed - balancing structured mastery with the freedom to explore tangential interests.

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Why Open Source?

Education is far too important to be locked behind proprietary walls. We’ve seen the bad that came from “enshittification”, and we've seen the good that came from Wikipedia and other open-source tools. We want to build a robust future for AI-powered learning.

We believe education should foster both mastery of existing knowledge and the curiosity to question it - creating learners who can stand at the frontier of knowledge and then push it forward through first-principles thinking.

Finally, we believe that making the product community-driven can give us a much broader perspective, to ensure the product is useful in a wide array of domains and circumstances.

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Roadmap

We’re still early!

Currently, you can upload documents (papers, syllabi, etc), and Skill Trees, Lessons, Activities, Feedback, Assistance and Interactive Podcasts are all generated for you.

We want to make the product faster, more in-depth, and more intuitive.

Soon, we'll support:

- Learning from videos, audio, and webpages - AI-generated diagrams using Mermaid - More activity types (You can also author your own!)

Thanks for checking it out! Please share any feedback in the comments :)