Dodo is an AI learning companion: an open-source app to help you understand, explain back, and remember any book or topic. 100% agentic, 30% finished.

I’ve always been a self-improver: languages (Spanish: easy; Chinese: not so much), music (guitar: my mother still believes; synths & Ableton: 🤷), sports (no, but I get yelled at less after 10 years of surfing). I’ve been through dozens of tutors and learning systems.

Over the next few years, people will build learning systems that change everything — systems that make us twice as smart. Dodo is not that. It’s me building a draft of a tool to help me learn, and along the way learning a bit more about how I learn. Maybe it leads to an idea; maybe it’s useful to someone else too.

There’s no magic to it. The most important thing is finding the books, videos, and other angles into the material you care about — you do that, not the AI. The next most important thing is truly engaging with it. What the app adds is the reinforcement: a tutor to talk things through with, flash cards, a daily quiz over iMessage, and the stakes of an oral exam.

“What I cannot create, I do not understand.”

— Richard Feynman

Dodo uses the Feynman technique:

1. Pick a concept and write down everything you know about it, in plain language, as if teaching a kid.
2. Notice where you get stuck, hand-wave, or fall back on jargon. Those gaps are exactly what you don’t actually understand — jargon is usually a costume for a fuzzy idea.
3. Go back to the source and fill just those gaps.
4. Simplify again. If you can’t say it plainly, you’re not done.

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• Topics from anything — send a URL, paste text, or name a book; Dodo ingests it (including YouTube transcripts) and it becomes a chat-able topic with an AI tutor grounded in that material.
• Flash cards with real scheduling — decks generated per topic, played as multiple choice, typed answers (LLM-graded), mixed rounds, or out-loud voice rounds. Thumbs-down buries a card, double-thumbs-up makes it a priority.
• Community topics — share a topic to the public directory; anyone can add it to their own library as an editable copy, flash deck included.
• Peck — a Duolingo-style level path across every deck you own.
• Stars and mastery — quizzes earn stars per topic; a final voice review earns a gold badge, and badges need a periodic 3-question refresher to stay gold.
• Daily card over iMessage — one card a day lands in Messages; your reply is graded and banked into the next Peck round.
• Pebbles — save quotes worth keeping; one resurfaces while a round is graded.
• Voice — talk to your tutor, take voice rounds, or do a walking review.
• Audio summaries — a narrated summary of a topic, playable with the screen locked.
• Root power — an agentic takeover mode: redo your flash cards, rewrite the grading criteria, or just sudo give me an A. It’s your account; Dodo complies.
• What it doesn’t yet do well: the main thing — you can just chat with Dodo about anything, but the system works best if you source the core learning material — a book, a lecture series, a YouTube video — and partner with Dodo to synthesize it.

More in the repo →