What Fennie Actually Is: A Tour of the Loop
For a long time, Fennie was a chatbot with some extras around it. You'd type a question, you'd get an answer, you'd close the tab. The notes feature was there. The flashcards were there. They didn't really talk to each other.
That's not what Fennie is anymore. The whole product got rebuilt around one idea: a study app should be one connected thing, not a feature list.
So this isn't a feature roundup. It's a tour of the loop. Seven objects and one quiet eighth one. They all talk to each other. That's the whole point.
The five-step loop, in one breath
You drop a syllabus into a Course. You add tests and papers to your Calendar. Every morning, you get a fresh Daily Plan — three or four specific things, ninety minutes max. You Study (chat, notes, quizzes, flashcards, essays). Memory watches the whole time and decides what tomorrow's plan looks like.
Drop in syllabus. Add deadlines. Get plan. Study. Memory adjusts.
That's it. The rest of this post is just zooming in on each piece.
Course
A Course is what happens when you drop a syllabus PDF in. Fennie reads it and produces a topic map for the whole term — week one is mechanics, week two is fluids, week ten is electromagnetism, the midterm is week six and covers weeks one through five.
Why this matters: every other object in the system needs to know what you're studying and where you are in the term. The Course is the spine. Without it, the daily plan is just a generic pile of suggestions. With it, the plan knows that you're three weeks out from the orgo midterm and the topics drifting onto your radar are the ones the syllabus says are next.
Concrete example. Pre-med freshman, Bio 101. The syllabus says lecture 7 covers cell membranes, lecture 8 covers transport. The Course knows. So when she opens Fennie on the morning of lecture 8, the plan suggests a quick flashcard review of yesterday's membrane vocabulary first, before lecture, when the priming will actually help.
Calendar
Calendar is where the deadlines live. Tests, papers, problem sets, anything with a due date.
You don't really "study" the calendar. You just put stuff in it. The reason it's worth talking about is that the calendar is what makes the daily plan reactive instead of static.
Quick example. Two students. Same Course. Same Memory state. One has a midterm Friday in that course; the other doesn't. Their Monday plans look completely different. The first one's Monday is heavier on review for that course, lighter on the others. By Wednesday it's basically all that course. Thursday is targeted weak-spots only.
The other student? Steady mix across all their courses. No urgency, no compression.
This is what we mean by "calendar-aware adaptation." It's not the calendar doing anything fancy. It's that the planner knows the calendar exists.
Plan
Every morning, the Plan generates fresh. Three to four items, usually 30-90 minutes total. Specific.
Not "study calculus." Specific.
A real plan might be:
- Flashcards: 14 cards from the orgo deck, 8 minutes
- Quiz: take the chapter 5 econ quiz (you wrote it last night)
- Note cleanup: this morning's bio lecture, ~20 minutes
- Chat: walk through the second proof from last week's discrete math problem set
That's the whole plan. You're done in 75 minutes. You can do it in three sittings or one. You can swap items if you have a reason. You can ignore it. But the default is short, concrete, and tied to what's actually due and what you're actually weak on.
The plan exists because "what should I study right now" is the single hardest question in college. The plan answers it before you have to ask.
Task
A Task is a single unit of "do this thing." A flashcard review session is a task. A note-cleanup is a task. Reading chapter 6 is a task. Drafting a thesis paragraph is a task.
The plan is composed of tasks. So is your week. So is the work that gets pulled forward when a deadline tightens.
The reason Task is its own object — and not just "a row in the plan" — is so that you can have tasks that don't belong to a plan yet. Things you know you need to do but haven't scheduled. The system pulls from this pool when it builds tomorrow's plan, in addition to generating new tasks based on Memory and Calendar.
Example: you finish lecture, you tag a note "I need to come back to this section about Lagrangians." That tag spawns a task. The task sits in your task list. The next morning, when the plan generator runs, it sees that task plus your physics midterm in nine days, and decides yes, today is a good day to slot in 25 minutes on Lagrangians.
Note
Notes are the pivot point in Fennie. Almost everything you study eventually flows through a note.
You take a note in lecture. You clean it up that evening. You click "generate flashcards" — boom, a deck. You click "generate quiz" — boom, a quiz, available to take whenever the plan suggests it.
Notes use markdown. They render LaTeX for math. They support code blocks for CS classes. They can be public or private. They link to each other.
Concrete example. Law student, Civ Pro. After class, she writes a note titled "Personal Jurisdiction: Pennoyer through Daimler." Headings for each major case. Bold-colon-definition for the legal terms (specific jurisdiction, general jurisdiction, minimum contacts, purposeful availment). She clicks generate flashcards. She gets 22 cards: case names matched to holdings, terminology, the test for each kind of jurisdiction. Three weeks later, when finals roll around, those 22 cards have been spaced and reviewed eight times. She knows them.
The note didn't sit in a folder. It compounded.
Quiz
A Quiz is what a Note becomes when you want to test yourself on it. Auto-generated from the note's content. You can pick difficulty, question count (up to about 50), and question types — multiple choice, short answer, problem-style, mixed.
The thing that's different about Fennie's quizzes versus generic test-yourself tools: every quiz you take feeds Memory. Got the SN1 vs SN2 question wrong? That doesn't disappear. The next time the plan runs, those concepts get scheduled more aggressively. Got it right three times in a row? It moves to maintenance mode and shows up less often.
Quizzes also generate from the chat history if you want — if you spent a long chat session working through a particular problem set with the tutor, you can spawn a quiz from that conversation to confirm the concepts stuck.
Flashcard
Flashcards live in decks. Decks are usually scoped to a class or a topic. They run on spaced repetition — a card you know well shows up rarely; a card you keep missing shows up daily until it sticks.
You make flashcards two ways. From a note (the dominant pattern). Or by hand, when you want a specific card the auto-generator wouldn't have caught.
The math here is simple. A flashcard you've seen 12 times across six weeks, spaced out by an algorithm that's getting harder when you nail it and easier when you miss it, is a flashcard whose contents now live in your long-term memory. A flashcard you wrote once and never reviewed is a flashcard about as useful as a Post-it stuck to the inside of a drawer.
Example. AP Bio student. He builds a flashcard deck from his lecture notes for the photosynthesis unit. There are 28 cards in the deck. Over the next month, he doesn't think about it — Fennie just shows him a few cards every morning during his daily plan. By the time the AP exam rolls around, those 28 cards have been reviewed an average of seven times each. He doesn't have to cram photosynthesis. It's just there.
Memory (the eighth piece)
This is the one that doesn't get a button in the sidebar.
Memory is the thing that sits behind the whole system, watching. It tracks what you know, what you don't, what you've been ignoring, your learning style (how you respond to different formats — diagrams vs. equations vs. prose). It notices that you always crush calc problems and always botch proofs. It notices that your econ note from three weeks ago hasn't generated a single flashcard. It notices that you skipped the plan two days in a row.
Memory is what makes the plan tomorrow morning feel like it knows you. Because it does. Not in a creepy way. In the way a good tutor knows their student — what's solid, what's wobbly, what to circle back on.
You don't configure Memory. You don't have to feed it. You just use the system, and Memory does its job.
Chat (the study tool, not the platform)
Chat is one of the five Study tools — alongside Notes, Quizzes, Flashcards, and Essays. Worth calling out separately because of its philosophy.
Fennie's chat won't hand you the answer. It teaches.
If you ask it "what's the answer to problem 4?" you'll get a question back. Probably a small one, designed to lead you to the next step. Most students initially find this annoying. About a week in, they get it.
The reason for this is anti-cheating, sure, but it's also pedagogy. You learn a thing by working through it, not by reading the answer. Fennie's chat is a tutor that knows how to hold the line.
Example dialogue, lightly real:
Student: I don't get why this integral diverges.
Fennie: Plot 1/x for me, in your head, between 1 and infinity. What's it doing?
Student: Going to zero.
Fennie: Right. Slowly though. Now what's the area under that curve from 1 to a really big number?
Student: Oh — it keeps growing because the function never quite gets there.
Fennie: Yeah. So when we integrate to infinity, what do you think happens?
Student: ...it diverges.
Fennie: Right. Now compare that to 1/x^2.
That's the pattern. Walk you to the edge of the answer, let you take the last step. The student who works through that exchange remembers the answer in a way the student who got it handed to them never will.
Essays
Essay support is the youngest tool in the kit. It's a writing environment that gives you feedback on structure, thesis development, evidence flow, clarity. It does not write the essay for you.
You can chat with Fennie about your draft and it'll push back. "Your second paragraph is making three points; pick one." "This thesis is descriptive, not argumentative." "Where's the counter-argument?" That kind of thing.
For pre-law students workshopping personal statements, MBA candidates working on application essays, or undergrads grinding through humanities papers, the essay tool is the natural extension of the chat philosophy: a coach, not a ghostwriter.
The whole point: they talk to each other
If you've made it this far, the thing to take away is not the feature list. It's the connections.
The Course knows the term arc. The Calendar knows the deadlines. The Plan reads both of those plus Memory to decide what you do today. Tasks live in the plan or wait outside it. Notes spawn Quizzes and Flashcards. Quizzes and Flashcards feed Memory. Memory adjusts the Plan.
That's a loop, not a list. Pull on any thread and the others move.
Most study apps are a feature list — here's a flashcard tool, here's a note tool, here's a chatbot, good luck. Fennie is shaped like the actual problem of being a student: not enough time, too many deadlines, inconsistent grasp on what's important. The loop is the answer to that problem.
Pricing, briefly
Free tier gets you the chat. That's the whole tutor, no question limit, just chat.
Premium (49.99/year) gets you the full loop — Courses, Calendar, the daily Plan, Notes that spawn Quizzes and Flashcards, Memory, Essays, all of it.
Most students who try the free chat for a week and like it move to premium because they want the plan. The plan is what changes how studying feels day-to-day.
Who this is for
Honestly: a lot of people. Engineering undergrads with three problem sets due Friday. Law students drowning in case names. Pre-med students managing the MCAT calendar. AP students juggling six classes. Homeschool parents trying to give their kid a real study loop. MBA candidates who haven't been in school in five years and forgot how to study.
The loop doesn't care what you're studying. It cares that you have things to learn, deadlines to hit, and gaps in what you know. Most students do.