Make a deck with AI

Tell an AI what you are studying. It writes the flashcards and they appear in Foldcard on your iPhone. You set it up once, with one copy and one paste.

Set it up on your Mac

This works on a Mac only. You need Claude, Codex or Antigravity on it, and iCloud Drive turned on on the Mac and on the iPhone.

Copy the setup message.
Open Claude, Codex or Antigravity on your Mac. In Claude, use the Code tab.
Paste the message and send it. Say yes when it asks to run something. It installs a small helper and connects it to your AI app.
Quit the app and open it again when it tells you the setup is done.

That is all. From now on, just ask, for example:

"Make a Foldcard deck from this PDF, about 30 cards."
"Add 10 cards about the Krebs cycle to my Biology deck in Foldcard."

The cards show up on your iPhone within a minute, with an Undo button. If your AI asks whether it may use iCloud Drive, say yes.

What exactly does this message say?

Please set up Foldcard for me on this Mac. I am not technical, so keep it simple.

1. Run this in the terminal: curl -fsSL https://foldcard.groovio.dev/ai/install.sh | sh
2. If something asks for permission, I allow it.
3. When it finishes, tell me in one or two plain sentences whether it worked, and what I should do next (for example, quit this app and open it again).
4. If it failed, explain what went wrong in plain words and fix it if you can.

The command downloads one signed helper, foldcard-mcp, into ~/.local/bin and adds it to Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity and Claude Desktop. It runs only on your Mac when the AI calls it and makes no network request. You can read the script first. Needs macOS 14 or later.

Something went wrong

The AI says it cannot run commands. You are probably in a plain chat. Use Claude's Code tab, Codex or Antigravity.
The AI cannot reach iCloud Drive. Open System Settings › Privacy & Security › Files and Folders and allow iCloud Drive for your AI app.
Using Claude Desktop only? Download foldcard.mcpb, double-click it and click Install.
Remove it. Ask your AI: "Run ~/.local/bin/foldcard-mcp uninstall, then delete that file."

The deck file

A deck file is UTF-8 JSON with the extension .foldcard:

"format": "foldcard-deck" and "version": 1.
"deck": the deck's "name". A deck in Foldcard with the same name, ignoring case and accents, gets the cards; otherwise a new deck is made.
"cards": 1 to 500 cards. Each is either a "question" with an "answer", or a "cloze" sentence whose hidden words are marked {{like this}}.
Optional: an "id" (a UUID) for the file, and an "id" for an existing deck. Other fields are ignored.

An empty question or answer, or a cloze sentence without {{ }}, is skipped and the rest is imported. Opening the same file twice adds nothing the second time.

Example

{
  "format": "foldcard-deck",
  "version": 1,
  "deck": { "name": "Cell biology" },
  "cards": [
    { "question": "What does ATP stand for?", "answer": "Adenosine triphosphate" },
    { "cloze": "The {{mitochondria}} make most of the cell's {{ATP}}." }
  ]
}

Undo and deleting

Tap Undo in the toast right after the import to take the cards back out. Later, delete cards one by one or delete the whole deck; deleted cards go to Decks › Deleted. From there, Delete forever or Delete all removes them for good.