quiz-after

When Claude finishes a task that changed something, a small quiz appears above the prompt: two or three questions about what was just built, each with a button that reveals the answer and why. It checks that you understand the change, not that you remember file names. Press Save to deck and the questions become spaced-repetition cards in your explain-this deck.

Quiz · Retry queue with backoff · fork: 48.2k cached, 350 new, 520 out
1. Why does the queue back off instead of retrying at a fixed rate?
   [ Reveal answer 1 ]
2. What happens to a job that fails after the last retry?
   a) It is dropped
   b) It goes to the dead-letter list
   c) It retries forever
   → It goes to the dead-letter list The worker never drops work silently.
[ Save to deck ]  [ Dismiss ]

How it decides

1. While a turn runs, it counts the main conversation's tool calls that were not read-only (an edit, a write, a Bash command that changes things, a subagent launch). Reads, searches, plain chat and bookkeeping tools (TodoWrite, the task tools, plan mode, AskUserQuestion, ToolSearch) count for nothing.
2. When the main turn ends normally and that count is above zero, it makes one $.model.fork call. The fork sees the conversation as the main thread last sent it and first answers: is the task actually finished?
3. Not finished: nothing is drawn. Finished: it returns JSON with the questions, which are cleaned up (bad fields dropped, at most three, multiple choice only when the answer is one of the choices) and drawn.

The fork runs after the turn has ended, on a timer, so it never holds up the turn. If you send a new prompt before it answers, that quiz is thrown away.

What it costs

| When | Model calls | Tokens | | --- | --- | --- | | Chat-only or read-only turn, aborted turn, subagent turn | none | 0 | | /quiz off | none | 0 | | A turn that changed something, quiz on, task finished | 1 fork | the whole transcript as input, served mostly from the prompt cache, plus about 350 new input tokens for the question and roughly 200 to 700 output tokens | | The same, but the fork judges the task unfinished | 1 fork | the same cached transcript and ~350 new input tokens, about 10 output tokens; nothing drawn | | /quiz now | 1 fork | as a finished task | | Reveal, Dismiss, Save to deck | none | 0 |

A fork reuses the main thread's prompt cache, so the transcript is billed at the cache-read rate rather than full input price, as long as the cache entry is still warm (it is: the turn just ended). The quiz header shows each fork's actual split, cached / new / out, so you can see what you paid. A cached number near zero means the cache had lapsed or the model changed, and that fork paid full price for the transcript.

The token figures above are estimates from the prompt's length, not measurements; the header's numbers are the real ones. The cached read is the big term: on a 100k-token session, every qualifying turn reads 100k cached tokens, finished or not.

Commands and keys

• /quiz toggles it on or off. The setting is kept in the plugin's $.store, so it survives restarts. /quiz on and /quiz off set it explicitly.
• /quiz now asks for a quiz about the work so far, skipping the "is it finished?" check. It works even while the mod is off.
• With the band focused (ctrl+x tab, or a click): 1, 2, 3 reveal answers, s saves to the deck, x dismisses. The declarations also say a bare digit typed into an empty prompt presses a band Button, so while a quiz is up, 1 in an empty prompt reveals answer 1 instead of typing (not tried live).

Save to deck (explain-this)

The button appends one card per question to $EXPLAIN_THIS_HOME/memory/cards.jsonl (default ~/.explain-this/memory/), in the shape explain-this/scripts/sm2.ts add writes: a fresh SM-2 state (interval_days 0, ease 2.5, due today), type transfer for transfer questions and recall otherwise, and the question's tag. The answer and its reason are stored together because explain-this review grades free-text answers against them. Questions already in the deck are skipped.

Nothing is written unless you press the button. If the memory folder does not exist, the mod creates nothing and says so in a toast. Run explain-this once to set the deck up.

Composes with

• Other bands above the prompt (for example token-weather): quiz-after draws its quiz and then whatever the rest of the chain draws (await next(e)) beneath it, so it never hides another mod. It steps aside while a survey holds the band.
• explain-this: shares its card deck, so explain-this review brings the questions back on the SM-2 schedule.
• Other fork-based mods (a next-steps supervisor, an assumptions check): each one is its own fork and pays its own cache read. If you run several, check the cached column before adding a third.
• A mode selector: quiz-after has no mode of its own yet. /quiz off is the switch a "learning mode" would flip.

Install

claude plugin validate templates/quiz-after
claude --plugin-dir templates/quiz-after
claude plugin test templates/quiz-after   # parsing, card shape, gating and the band on terminal and desktop

Copy the folder and rename it before changing it. Built against Claude Code 2.1.286's declarations.