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Kizuki
Kizuki 1.0 runs in your terminal

Study smarter, not longer.

Kizuki turns your slides, PDFs, documents, and spreadsheets into a teach-back session in your terminal. You explain concepts from memory, and Kizuki questions your gaps by quoting directly from your material.

What you need first

気付き (kizuki) is Japanese for noticing, as in noticing a gap in what you know.

気 Kizuki 1.0.0

Teach a concept back. Kizuki plays the student and quotes your material.

/teach calvin cycle

Teach: The Calvin cycle

Explain it from memory, in your own words. The material stays hidden until you finish.

The Calvin cycle happens in the thylakoid membranes. It uses ATP and NADPH to turn carbon dioxide into sugar.

Round 1 of up to 3

The section “The Calvin cycle” of photosynthesis.md says: “The Calvin cycle takes place in the stroma.” You wrote: “thylakoid membranes”. How does that fit?

[1] The section “The Calvin cycle” of photosynthesis.md

kizuki · Biology · 3 due · qwen3.5:2b

The question comes from a real session with the default small model on a laptop.

Built on how memory works.

Kizuki makes you recall, explain, and come back later. Decades of studies show those three habits beat rereading.

50% more

remembered a week later by students who practiced recalling a passage, compared with students who reread it: 61% against 40%.

Roediger & Karpicke, 2006

¼ the reading

for the same students. The recall group read the passage 3.4 times; the rereading group read it 14.2 times and still remembered less.

Roediger & Karpicke, 2006

77%

of students who crammed scored below the average student who spread the same recall practice over days.

Latimier, Peyre & Ramus, 2021, a research review

71%

of students who studied for a test scored below the average student who prepared to teach the material and then taught it.

Kobayashi, 2019, a review of 28 studies

Kizuki, measured.

92%

of planted mistakes caught in Kizuki's model tests, with the default small model on a laptop.

0

made-up quotes shown. Code checks every quote word for word against your material before you see it.

$0

to run. No account, and your material stays on your computer.

The study numbers come from published research on these methods, not from Kizuki users. Read the full research summary.

How a session goes.

  1. 1

    Add your material

    Slides, PDFs, Word and Excel files, notes. Drop them onto the terminal window. Kizuki reads the text and remembers the page, slide, or cell each passage came from.

  2. 2

    Confirm the concepts

    Kizuki turns each heading into a concept, and a small model suggests ideas inside each section. Type /review and keep the ones you want. Kizuki uses nothing you didn't confirm.

  3. 3

    Explain one without your notes

    Write it the way you would explain it to a classmate. Kizuki keeps the material hidden until you finish, because recalling it beats rereading it.

  4. 4

    Answer the student’s questions

    Up to three rounds. Kizuki asks where your explanation disagrees with the material, what the material says that you left out, and what you meant by vague words.

  5. 5

    Confirm what you missed

    You tick the points you missed, then read the passages. After misses, you can try again right away. After a clean session Kizuki waits twice as long before the next review; after a miss, the concept comes back tomorrow. If you set an exam date, Kizuki moves reviews before it.

A few commands.

Kizuki runs in your terminal like a coding agent. Type / to see every command, or /help for what each one does.

CommandWhat it does
/add notes.pdfAdd a file. Dropping it onto the window does the same.
/reviewConfirm the concepts and the order Kizuki suggests.
/teachExplain the first concept that is due.
/dueSee what is due now, what comes next, and what waits on something else.
/exam 2026-12-15Move reviews before your exam.
/open 1Open source [1] in its file.

It only quotes your material.

Kizuki's model can't write facts, quotes, or questions in its own words. The code checks this before you see anything.

  • The model only points at sentences of your material. Kizuki shows those sentences word for word.
  • Kizuki writes each question from a fixed template around the exact sentence, with a link to where it came from.
  • If nothing in your material matches what you wrote, Kizuki says “not in your material” and asks nothing.
  • When you and your material disagree, you decide. If the slide had a typo, you correct it, and Kizuki uses your version from then on.

It stays on your computer.

You don't need an account. Kizuki runs a small model through Ollama, and it keeps your files and history in one folder you can copy or delete.

  • Your data: ~/.kizuki
  • Default models: qwen3.5:2b and nomic-embed-text
  • You can use MLX on Apple chips, or bigger hosted models with your own Vercel AI Gateway key (/model gateway). Before Kizuki sends anything off your computer, it asks you.

Set up.

  1. 1

    Install Node.js and Ollama

    Node.js 22.18 or newer, and Ollama.

  2. 2

    Download the two models

    ollama pull qwen3.5:2b
ollama pull nomic-embed-text
  3. 3

    Start Kizuki

    npx kizuki

    It checks the models and starts in your terminal. Type /help for commands. To keep it installed, run npm install -g kizuki and start it with kizuki.