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Mobin Poursalami
Mobin Poursalami

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I Built a Private Q&A Platform After Getting Frustrated With Stack Overflow

#privacy #tooling #showdev #ai

I spent the last few months building CodeAnswr, a private Q&A platform, after hitting some major pain points with Stack Overflow.

The Problems I Was Facing:

  • Waiting hours or sometimes days for an answer
  • Anxiety about posting code that might contain sensitive information
  • Limited multi-language support
  • Cluttered UI that makes it hard to focus

What I Built:

CodeAnswr focuses on three main things:

  1. Privacy First - Before you post, it scans your code for API keys, passwords, and other sensitive data. No more accidental leaks.

  2. Instant Answers - Using AI, you get immediate responses. Not perfect, but way faster than waiting for a human.

  3. Multi-Language Support - Works with JavaScript, Python, Java, Go, C++, and more. Clean detection that actually works.

Key Technical Challenges:

Building this taught me a lot about rate limiting (especially across multiple APIs), handling abuse detection, and managing performance under load. The biggest surprise was how much users care about speed - even 100ms slower breaks the UX.

What I Learned:

  • Privacy concerns are HUGE. People mentioned this unprompted more than any other feature.
  • Speed matters more than I expected
  • Multi-language support is harder than it sounds
  • Building in public helped way more than marketing

Where I'm At:

It's still early stage. I'm working through improving answer quality, building out community features, and optimizing performance.

I'd love to hear from developers here about what you think. What would actually make you switch from Stack Overflow? Any concerns about AI-generated answers? What features matter most to you?

Thanks for reading. Feel free to check it out at codeanswr.com and let me know your thoughts!

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