I'm a bioinformatics senior at UCSD trying to use the remaining weeks to build something meaningful. I built Notie (https://notieapp.com), an AI-native study app where the AI lives inside your PDF instead of a separate tab. Free while I iterate.
A few things I've already built that students have told me actually help, so we can skip past them in the comments. Highlight a passage and the AI conversation is anchored to that highlight, with the document and conversation history loaded as context. Auto-generated flashcards from your highlights with spaced repetition, and from any flashcard you can jump back to the exact passage in the source PDF that generated it. Auto-tagging on highlights so you can find them later by topic. Cross-document AI ask so you can compare what one paper says against another in one workspace. PPTX export for anyone who wants to turn highlights into a deck. The whole thing is built around the idea that AI should be the main character of studying, not a side helper.
What I'm asking the community: what's the AI feature you wished existed when you were studying, that nobody has built yet, or that everyone builds badly?
A few directions I've been thinking about but haven't committed to. An 'explain like I'm five' that actually works because it's grounded in your specific document, not generic. A 'find the contradictions' feature that flags when two of your sources disagree. A study-companion mode that asks you Socratic questions about a passage instead of giving you answers. An exam-mode that surfaces the highlights you keep getting wrong on flashcards and proactively re-explains them with new analogies. A 'concept map' view that auto-builds the relationships between ideas across your documents.
I'm not going to build all of these. I want to know which ones you would have actually used as a student, and which ones sound clever but you'd never open twice. Especially curious about features other study tools do badly, where the AI version could be meaningfully better.
If you're a current student, recent grad, or someone who's tutored, your taste here is exactly what I'm trying to calibrate against. Drop a comment with the feature you wish existed. I'll read every reply.