Use case · Students

Eyrie for students.

For undergrads taking five courses, grad students slogging through 200-page papers, MBA students with three group projects per semester, and lifelong learners who refuse to forget what they read last summer. AI study notes that show their work.

What students do with notes (and where it goes wrong).

The bad pattern.

Take 200 pages of lecture notes in week 1-12. Two days before the final, try to find anything. Search 14 different folders. Re-watch the lectures because the notes weren't searchable. Pull an all-nighter. Forget everything within a month.

The pattern that works.

Take notes as plain Markdown files, one per lecture or reading. Tag by topic. Use AI to surface "what did the professor say about X?" when you need it. Build a permanent vault that survives semesters. By senior year your accumulated notes are a knowledge base, not a graveyard.

Why Eyrie fits this better than the alternatives.

Vs Notion.

Notion is overkill for class notes. Your lecture from 18 months ago shouldn't live on Notion's servers behind a subscription. Markdown files on your Mac do the same job for free (after the one-time $79).

Vs Apple Notes.

Fine for grocery lists. Insufficient for serious study notes. No AI search, no backlinks, no semantic retrieval. Export is .txt only.

Vs handwriting.

Studies say handwriting helps retention. Sure — for the moment. But future-you needs to find what past-you wrote, and handwritten notes lose to searchable text every single time. Hybrid is fine: write by hand in class for retention, type up the key points in Eyrie that night for retrieval.

Vs OneNote.

OneNote's free, but it stores notes in Microsoft's cloud and the format is OneNote-only. Markdown's portability is the trade-off worth making.

The student workflow.

1. One folder per semester. ~/Notes/2026-Fall/. Subfolder per course.
2. One file per lecture. Named 2026-09-15_Lecture-03.md. Frontmatter with date, topic, prof. Headings for sub-topics. Wikilinks to readings.
3. One file per reading. Quotes that mattered, your reaction, questions. Wikilinks to lectures that referenced it.
4. "Exam prep" file per course, built up over the semester. Smart Categories tags these as "reference." End of semester: ask Eyrie's chat panel to summarize the whole course from your notes. Sourced answers — verify each claim against the actual lecture file.
5. Cross-course wikilinks. The connections between courses are where the real learning happens. Mark them as you notice them.

The AI question for students.

Don't use AI to generate notes you didn't take. That's plagiarism dressed up. Use AI to:

• Search your existing notes faster than you could yourself.
• Find connections between courses you took 2 years apart.
• Summarize a course at exam time — using your notes, not Wikipedia.
• Rewrite a clunky paragraph in a paper you're drafting.

None of this replaces actually doing the work. All of it makes the work compound.

The pricing argument for students.

You probably have a free ChatGPT or Claude account. You don't need Notion AI's $10/month upcharge or Mem's $15/month subscription. Eyrie is $79 once — about three lunches — and it pays itself back if it saves you one all-nighter.

(We don't offer a student discount because $79 once is already cheaper than any monthly subscription. If you're a student with a genuine hardship case, email [email protected] — we'll figure something out.)