Did You Even Listen

AI that coaches your note-taking instead of replacing it. Record lectures, write your own notes, then let AI highlight what you missed — and make you fix it yourself.

Comment

Inspiration

We live in an era of peak brain rot — AI writes your emails, summarizes your readings, and takes your lecture notes, and honestly, it's kind of ruining us. Every new tool promises to do more for you, but the moment AI starts thinking instead of you, you lose the skills that actually matter. Note-taking isn't busywork — it's how your brain processes, organizes, and retains information, and we wanted to build something that pushes back: AI as a coach, not a crutch.

What it does

Did You Even Listen has three modes. Feedback records your lecture, lets you write your own notes, then benchmarks them against AI-generated notes, color-coding every issue (missing, incorrect, vague, verbose) and walking you through guiding questions instead of just giving you the answer. Metacognition has you rate your own understanding section by section before seeing any feedback, then shows you where your self-assessment diverges from reality. Quiz generates active recall questions from the lecture so you actually process what you heard. When you're done, everything including your notes, AI notes, and transcript saves to your Obsidian vault.

How we built it

Platform: Obsidian Plugin (Electron/Chromium desktop app), TypeScript, esbuild

Editor: CodeMirror 6 — custom inline highlight decorations, markdown syntax highlighting, undo/redo history

AI & Speech:

  • Groq whisper-large-v3-turbo for real-time audio transcription
  • Groq llama-3.3-70b-versatile for note generation, Socratic feedback, metacognition analysis, and quiz generation — all via structured JSON prompts

Challenges we ran into

  • Obsidian's plugin API doesn't behave like a normal DOM, making interactive highlights and tooltips difficult to inject cleanly.

  • The hint system required many iterations to guide students without accidentally giving the answer away.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • The feedback system actually works — the AI consistently catches real note-taking errors and asks genuinely useful guiding questions rather than just dumping corrections.

  • Built a full Obsidian plugin from scratch with custom UI, inline highlights, interactive tooltips, and multiple modes in under 24 hours.

  • The metacognition mode delivers on its concept, as watching your self-rating get compared to the AI score in real time is genuinely eye-opening.

What we learned

  • Obsidian's editor API is nothing like normal web development, and layering custom UI on top of it without breaking things was a crash course in DOM management.

  • Designing for learning instead of convenience forced us to rethink every UX decision since the goal was to make things appropriately challenging, not easy.

What's next for Did You Even Listen

  • Implementing pattern detection to track topics a student consistently struggles with across multiple sessions, turning the plugin into a long-term personalized learning coach.

  • Expanding beyond Obsidian to support other note-taking platforms so more students can access it.

  • Adding a progress dashboard that visualizes how a student's note-taking quality improves over time.

Share this project:

Updates