SocrAL

Gain deeper understanding and form stronger memories of your lifelong learning. Based on Active Recall. A combination of scientifically proven effects: testing, retrieval practice and generation.

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How I came there

I'm 65 and and my experience increasingly convinced me that Lifelong learning is the key skill to stay relevant.

I used Bolt for almost a year and did some smaller learning apps with it.

This is a new project I thought and did in less than 20 days.

Leonard Da Vinci said that Curiosity was the fuel for knowledge acquisition. I agree.

Watching videos is easy.

There's one big problem left: Elaboration and Retention. Without it reading or watching videos is like trying to fill a leaking bucket.

We know a good science-based solutions: retrieval practice, generation and socratic questioning.

We are left with two problems: motivating ourselves and seing what we don't understand.

A simple playful interface with boards and tracking helps to stay engaged.

Learning Science tells us that retrieval practice, using socratic questions is the best solution.

That's what this app implements.

AI comes to the rescue for the last one. We keep track of what we learn. An AI produces questions of increasing difficulty, stretch us toward our blind spots and rate our answers.

Step by step the goal is accomplish we learn deeper and expand our understanding.

Our target audience are 40 y+.

We need a UX people can learn by themselves. So we use progressive disclosure.

We start with as little elements as possible, assist focusing on inputs, getting to the aha moment quickly.

it also help for learning in keeping cognitive load low.

When people are more accustomed to the process they can start using more of this feature rich app.

What it does

It creates deep, relevant, personalized and challenging questions and rate them based on our context.

A dashboard display stats, our knowledge base and questions left to answer.

Voice support is everywhere and allows to use the app without a keyboard.

How we built it

A very first prompt set the stack: react, supabase, edge functions, support for multiple AI providers (OpenAI, claude, Mistral, Deepseek).

A design system made with plain css and scss but very structured with imbrications and modern css. I like to retain fine control my css and benefit from every recent evolution.

We added early responsive support and dark/light/auto themes.

Then prompts after prompts we added support for user stories one after the other.

Some manuals edits to fix theme, responsive design ajustements.

Some more to fix UX and logic that were more direct then finding complex prompts.

Challenges we ran into

Simple changes are the hardest to prompt.

Discuss mode is valuable but very often the answer is long and i's faster to ust try what we get.

As the project grow, tokens are consumed at a vertiginous rate, even for single file changes.

We had stories automated testing, storybook buthad to remove them to keep the project under bolts limits. I didn't know about .bolt/ignore at that time.

The ease of vibe coding makes it easy to add too much stuff and end up with a clutured UX.nce

A hail storm hit our part of France as i was finishing. I had to ignore the leaking roof and stay focused, moving to friends house to finish :) Life has its challenges too. Thx Cecicle, Pierre, Vanessa, Christelle and Loic for your support.

There are some adjustments to do in color contrasts. That's something humans are uniquely qualified and sensible to. It takes more time than I had.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Overall it's a good project, valuable and done in limited time. I think without bolt I would have taken several months of intense work. Likely I wouldn't have done it.

In a second stage a lot of effort was put to control the complexity and keep the favored path simple yet the app powerful.

I did the new landing page in one prompt: multiple sections: Problem Agitation Solution.

What we learned

Bolt is a superb learning tool. I knew very little about supabase, policies, edge functions. Having bolt do all the job for me on my project was like taking a personalized training on supabase. Now I know a lot more and can ask exactly what I want. I am more willing to use supabase for other projects.

Prompting, prompting, prompting.

Project Management wih AI/Vibe coding. It has similarities with working with team members and differences. Reading bloggers, watching videos during he last months helped me a lot.

I learned too late about the .bolt/ignore

Ai Coding is of very good quality, high standards in term of style. Almost disturbing

What's next for SocrAL

A name change :) Haven't found yet a good catchy name. This is also the reason why I didn't look into a custom domain.

There is an Expo app coming. Sadly it wasn't possible to have both in the same project but it will share 90% of the code. The project is started on bolt too.

It's shipped. 7 people tried it already at the time I'm posting that. More will try in coming weeks.

I plan to open source it and allow people to use their own keys. No strings attached.

A paid hosted version will be available at a reasonable rate.

The main source of revenue will come from companies willing to have it on instances they retain control on.

Long form of the video if you are interested to see allthe power of the app

Youtube video 6mins

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