Essays on how learning actually works.
Learning science, product design, method notes, safety essays. Every Brainback decision is downstream of one of these — published in the open.
Learning science
The 100+ years of research that make Brainback's design non-optional.
Handing a student the answer skips exactly the moment learning happens.
Bjork's principle — and why productive struggle is the whole point.
One of the most robust findings in learning science, quietly built into every recall review.
One creates capability. The other creates the feeling of capability.
Product design
Why refusing to give the answer is the product's whole design brief.
A single hint is a random walk. A ladder is a curriculum.
One number, three components, weekly cadence.
Efficiency mode is normal AI. Except when it isn't.
The privacy stance behind the parent dashboard.
The economics behind a product that could technically be free.
A brief history of student-facing AI and what it optimized for.
The right kind of frustration is a feature. Here's how we tell them apart.
Why the tutor ends every reply with exactly one guiding question.
Why we generate recall cards from your errors, not from pre-made decks.
Method
How Brainback actually implements the theory, line by line.
What Socrates got right — and what needed a system prompt.
SM-2 is 40 years old and still the right default. Here's why.
Knowing what you don't know is 30% of your Brain score. Here's why.
You can recognize a concept without knowing it. Explaining it back is where the gap surfaces.
Card generation, review UX, and the edge cases every implementer meets.
Every attempt asks the student their confidence. Here's what happens next.
System prompts stay warm. Per-problem context stays warm. Cost stays down.
One paragraph, delivered warmly, thousands of times.
Safety
Guardrails, output guards, adversarial resistance.
Data
What the numbers say — from pilots and beta cohorts.
the essays are downstream
Come see the product they built.
Every one of these turns into a line of code inside Brainback.