u/h-now

Hey everyone! I'll be moving to Fairbanks soon for about a year for hospital training/work and I'm starting to look into getting a vehicle. I've heard a lot of good things about Affordable Used Cars, but from what I've seen they might be a little outside my budget for only being here a year. I've also been keeping an eye on FB Marketplace and have seen a few options pop up.

I was wondering if anyone has recommendations for:

- Good places to buy a reliable used car without breaking the bank.

- Makes/models that tend to do well in Fairbanks winters

- A trustworthy mechanic who could do a pre-purchase inspection if I find something on Marketplace

- Any dealerships or sellers I should avoid.

- Even if anyone has a vehicle sitting around that isn't getting much use, I'd also be interested in working out an off-market arrangement

Nothing fancy just something dependable that'll get me through winter and point A->B

Really appreciate any advice or local recs. Thanks!

Okay so I need to preface this by saying I am not a developer. I'm a med student who got frustrated enough to figure this out w/ LLMs doing the heavy lifting instead of wasting time on editing cards in anki...

The Problem

If you use AnKing + Sketchy like most of us, you've probably hit this wall: you're flying through your daily Anki reviews and you see a card about, say, vancomycin MOA. You know you've seen this in Sketchy. You vaguely remember something, but you can't remember the actual association that's supposed to glue the fact to your brain, and you definitely don't have time to go rewatch the video or dig through the image mid-review or while in lecture crushing cards etc. Even hitting the anki image toggle and scanning through the 40+ picture associations with certain sketchys chews up time trying to look for a single card association etc.

The result of this imo is that you're basically just memorizing the text on the card (Anki's cardinal no-no). the visual scaffold completely falls away, and you're left w/ a 4000-card deck that functions no differently than a regular flashcard set.

I had this problem badly. I was doing tons of cards a day and the associations I'd built during initial watch were fading, especially videos from first year etc. When the card came up, I'd see the answer on the back, say "oh right, I remember", but I wasn't actually reconstructing the association. I was pattern-matching the text. That's not the same thing and it's not going to stick on test day.

What I Wanted

I wanted the Sketchy associations to live on the back of the card itself, organized by the scene sections Sketchy uses, so when I flip a card, I see:

[Back of card]

Vancomycin binds D-Ala-D-Ala

Sketchy Associations:

Van (Vancomycin)
– Temple wall hieroglyphs → inhibits cell wall synthesis by directly binding D-Ala-D-Ala
– Ineffective guard → beta-lactamases are ineffective against vancomycin
– Ivy Whip → IV administration

Now I'm forced to mentally check: do I remember that image? If yes, I can glide through the card in a few seconds. If no, I know I need to rewatch or hit again. The text is a scaffold for the visual, not a replacement for it.

The Solution (the actual automation)

I took notes on every Sketchy Pharm video in Notion, organized by the visual sections/scene headers in each video. Then I built a Python pipeline w/ claude cowork that:

1. Pulls my Notion notes via API → extracts associations organized by section headers
2. Matches those associations to the correct AnKing cards using TF-IDF similarity (basically keyword matching that's smart enough to not get confused by similar drug names)
3. Creates subdecks mirroring the SketchyPharm module structure inside AnKing
4. Writes the associations to the back of every matched card, organized by section

Claude writes the JSON file once from my Notion notes, runs the script, and every relevant AnKing card gets updated and pulls directly from the Anking tags for each topic. No touching cards manually. No copy-pasting. The subdeck organization also means I can filter by Sketchy module when I want to do targeted review or.

How to Replicate This

You don't need to know how to code. You need:

• Claude Cowork (Paid plan w/ computer use access, it's like $20 a month, worth every penny this past year, not sponsored or this being an ad in any way shape or form)
• Anki desktop w/ the AnkiConnect add-on installed (free, add-on #2055492159)
• Notion (free) for organizing your Sketchy notes by scene section (can prob use tons of other note apps or document idk pick your flavor)
• A clear description of what you want and how to format the cards

Start a session w/ Claude Cowork and say something like:

"I take Sketchy notes in Notion organized by scene headers. I want a Python script that pulls those notes via the Notion API, matches them to the right AnKing cards using keyword matching, and adds them to the back of each card organized by section. Here's what my Notion notes look like: [paste example, or connect cowork to your specific notes taking app]."

Claude will ask clarifying questions, write the scripts, and walk you through testing it. The whole setup process took a few sessions of back-and-forth. Once it's working, adding a new lesson takes < 2 minutes.

The Customizability Factor

One thing I want to emphasize, the associations on the card back are completely in your control. You decide what level of detail to put in your Notion notes, which means you decide what appears on the card.

A note on AI and studying (I know, I know)

I want to address something directly because I think it matters: I am genuinely, deeply opposed to AI slop in medical edu + society as a whole. I'm talking about using GPT etc to summarize your lecture slides so you don't have to read them, or generating "study guides" you passively scroll through, etc. I use atlas on the daily while reviewing UW questions and can't describe how huge it is having a tutor to work w/ 24/7.

This is not that imo. What I played around w/ Claude Cowork is a tool that shapes how I study, built around my note-taking system, my Sketchy workflow, and my specific frustrations w/ how associations were falling out of my reviews. Claude didn't learn the material for me. It didn't summarize Sketchy. It didn't generate fake mnemonics. It wrote the plumbing, the API calls, the matching logic, the card formatting, so that the knowledge I built while actively watching and taking notes could live somewhere useful instead of evaporating.

This workflow worked for me. It might not work for you & that's okay. Everyone's brain encodes information differently, and if your current Sketchy + Anki system is working, don't fix what isn't broken. But if you're hitting the same wall I was w/ grinding through cards, losing the visual scaffold, watching your retention slip despite hours of reviews, then this kind of individualized pipeline is absolutely worth exploring. This also isn't something you cram or change with your patterns 1-2 weeks before boards lmfao.

Side tangent: MM HY Arrows

While I was at it, I also built a pipeline for Mehlman's HY Arrows PDF. If you don't know it, it's 168 physiology arrow questions (↑ renin, ↓ aldosterone, etc.) that are absolutely essential for Step 1. I had it as a PDF sitting in my downloads doing nothing after reviewing it.

The script:

• Parses the PDF (handling the funky arrow characters the PDF uses)
• Creates one Anki card per question using the AnKingOverhaul note type
• Sets "One by one: y" so each arrow reveals one at a time when you hit space (sequential reveal)
• Organizes them into 17 subdecks of 10 questions each, properly named so they sort in order

Idk if it breaks copyright or whatever so not gonna post it, but I just want to prove that there is are tons of flexibility of how to use cowork and create different decks. Gonna keep arrows in the anki roto during 3rd year without a doubt. Will answer any comment anyone has or feel free to PM.

PS: I used cowork to word vomit most of this reddit post from the cowork session and then make personal tweaks along the way to save time + improve readability.

TLDR: Built a Python script that pulls Sketchy associations from Notion and automatically writes them to AnKing card backs, organized by scene section. Also built a MM HY Arrows parser. The point is to see the text association on card review so you're reinforcing the visual-to-fact pathway instead of just re-reading the answer.