I set out to work through a fixing plan for my German study bot. The streak
needed to require a real daily minimum instead of counting a single card, I
wanted timed nudges that push an actual recall task into the chat at set times
so the studying comes to me, and the review screen had a backlog of problems:
multiple-choice options pulled from other cards’ notes so the four answers were
incoherent, a cloze card that printed the answer while you were supposed to be
recalling it, and rating buttons labelled so tersely they meant nothing.

I built all of it. The streak now counts how many cards you answer each day and
only advances once you reach a goal you set with /goal, and it shows today’s
progress everywhere. Nudges are a new module that registers one scheduled job
per time you choose; when one fires it takes a due card, turns it into a
translate or fill-in-the-blank task, sends it inline, and grades whatever you
type back. Multiple-choice options are now filtered down to clean English
meanings, the answer no longer shows before you try, “Again” became “Forgot”
with a short legend, and I added a plain word-only review mode alongside the
existing mixed ones. The change set stayed under tests the whole way, 54 up
to 95.

The real problem only showed up once I used the bot: every card took roughly
half a minute to appear. Nothing looked broken, so I read the logs, ruled out
my own code, and timed the Gemini calls directly. One enrichment call was
taking 27 seconds. I benchmarked the configured model against a few
alternatives on the same request, and gemini-3.5-flash came back around 24
seconds while gemini-2.5-flash answered in about one. The slowness was never in
the bot, it was the model set in the config, and changing that single line took
review from unusable to about a second a card. A smaller fix came out of the
same session: a forgotten card used to reappear the same day, which is pointless
since you just saw it, so it now schedules for tomorrow, and because that made
two of the new-card buttons read the same one-day gap I pushed “Hard” out to
two days.