Telegram paper-filter bot — 16yo, looking for a technical roast

Ares — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 08:21:15 +0000

I’m 16 and built a Telegram bot that helps people sort new papers instead of drowning in them. I’m not a researcher. I want engineers to tell me what’s fragile, overbuilt, or dumb.

What it does
You type a topic. It searches arXiv, PubMed, Semantic Scholar, Crossref, and OpenAlex, dedupes, ranks, and lets you tap not interested / seen, save to a library, and export BibTeX. Deep read is title + abstract only — no PDFs. There is no morning auto-push (free host sleeps). /digest plus your topics, comma-separated is on-demand.

Bot: https://t.me/paper_filter_bot
If it doesn’t answer, wait ~30–60s and send again.

How it runs
Telegram webhook on a free Render web service. Flask receives updates. Searches hit the five APIs in parallel, then rank (venue-ish signals, citations, followed-author boost, seen/skip weights). gpt-4o-mini for the abstract pass. State in Turso (library, prefs, quotas). Optional web UI exists; Telegram is the real product.

What’s hard now
I can no longer find bugs by using it myself. A Reddit post on r/SideProject was eaten by filters (new account + Telegram link). I don’t have researchers who can help me test the system if it really useful. So this post is for software notes, not product-market.

What I want
Blunt notes on cold start, webhook vs polling, ranking from title/abstract, quota design, anything you’d refuse to ship. “Fine for 16” is useless. “This will break when…” is useful.
You can also type /feedback plus your note inside the bot instead of only commenting here.

DEV Community: Ares

Telegram paper-filter bot — 16yo, looking for a technical roast