A few weeks ago I was doing what every Class 12 student in India eventually has to do, trying to figure out which college to apply to.
And it was a mess.
Information scattered across 10 different websites. Rankings that contradicted each other. No way to compare colleges side by side. AI tools that confidently hallucinated placement stats.
I got frustrated. So I did what made the least practical sense given my situation, I started building a solution.
The context that makes this slightly unhinged,
My ISC board exams are ongoing. My Computer Science paper is on March 27th. JEE Mains is right after that.
I started building Collex on March 16th.
What I built,
Collex is a free college research platform for Indian students. Here's what it has right now:
350+ Indian colleges listed
Filters by state, rating, and average LPA
AI-powered college reviews and analysis (Groq API)
A college comparison tool
A chatbot for college-related queries
A "Request a College" feature for missing entries
The entire thing is built in vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The AI integration runs through a Vercel serverless proxy to keep the API key secure.
What I learned
AI wrote a significant chunk of this codebase. But the moments that actually taught me something were the ones where things broke and the AI had no useful answer, a misconfigured serverless function, a CORS error at midnight, a deployment pipeline that silently failed.
Those moments required actually understanding what was happening. And that's probably the most honest thing I can say about building with AI: it gets you 70% there really fast. The other 30% still requires you.
Where it is now
Live at collex-amber.vercel.app. About 40+ genuine visitors so far, mostly from LinkedIn and Product Hunt. No sign-ups yet, but people are using the search and filters, which means the core thing works.
Next steps: grow the college database, add more verified data, and figure out a sustainable way to keep it free for students.
If you're a student, a developer, or just someone who thinks Indian edtech has too many gaps — check it out, and tell me what's missing.
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