Pathwise 🔮

Sarthak Srivastava — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 07:08:48 +0000

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend

What I Built

Pathwise is an AI-powered career decision platform designed specifically for my friend who is currently struggling with severe post-graduation career paralysis.

Instead of traditional, static career counseling that leaves them anxious, Pathwise acts as a "Future Me Simulator." It takes their skills, interests, and industry trends to simulate concrete outcomes for different career paths. It breaks down their long-term goals into visual Risk Radars, actionable 5-year Project Roadmaps, and Confidence Scores—all presented in a clean Bento-grid dashboard to turn abstract career anxiety into actionable clarity.

Demo

Live Demo: https://pathwise-cl9l.onrender.com*

Code

{https://github.com/ursarthak001/PATHWISE}

How I Built It

I built the entire application using open-source tools and open-weight models:

Core AI Engine: I used Google's open-weight Gemma-2-9b-it (via the Hugging Face Inference API) to generate the personalized career trajectories and risk analyses.
Prompt Engineering & Validation: I leveraged Python and Pydantic to strictly structure the LLM prompts, ensuring Gemma returns perfectly formatted data for the charts and roadmaps.
Frontend UI: Streamlit allowed me to rapidly build out the complex Bento-grid dashboard layout natively in Python.
Deployment: Pushed securely via Git/GitHub and hosted seamlessly on Render, utilizing Hacktoberfest partner credits for uninterrupted uptime.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

Open innovation was absolutely critical to this project because career aspirations and anxieties are highly personal. By building on open-weight models like Gemma, I wasn't locked into expensive, opaque proprietary APIs that might quietly ingest my friend's vulnerable data.

Furthermore, the open-source ecosystem—from Python's robust libraries to the accessible Hugging Face hub—allowed me to build, iterate, and deploy a professional-grade AI application over a single weekend without spending a dime on enterprise software. Open innovation democratizes the ability to solve hyper-specific, personal problems using world-class intelligence.

My Agent Session

Throughout this time-crunched weekend, I heavily utilized my local AI agent to troubleshoot localhost connection errors, bypass terminal Git issues via GitHub Desktop, and successfully deploy the repository securely to the cloud before the deadline.

Prize Categories

Best Use of Gemma: Pathwise's "Future Me Simulator" logic and structured generation relies entirely on Google's open-weight Gemma-2-9b-it model.
Best Use of Render: The interactive Streamlit frontend and API routing backend are fully deployed and hosted as a Web Service on Render.

DEV Community: Sarthak Srivastava