I built a tool that reads your contract and flags the risky clauses in plain English

#ai #webdev #python #showdev

The contract clause that almost cost my friend their side projects

A friend nearly signed a freelance contract that assigned the company all the
IP they created — including personal side projects done on their own time — plus
a 3-year industry-wide non-compete and net-90 payment terms. To them it just
looked like normal legal boilerplate. It wasn't.

Most of us sign leases, freelance agreements, NDAs and job offers we don't fully
understand, because a lawyer costs hundreds and the language is deliberately
dense. So I built a small tool to make contracts legible for non-lawyers.

What it does

Paste a contract (or the clauses you're unsure about) into
ClauseClear and it returns:

a plain-English summary and a risk score
the clauses that actually matter — each with what it means, why it matters, and what to ask for instead
protections that seem to be missing
questions to ask before you sign

It's honest that it's an AI first-read, not legal advice — but as a "should I
worry about this?" gut-check before you sign, it's genuinely useful.

How it's built

A tiny Python (WSGI, standard-library) backend forwards your text to a free, OpenAI-compatible LLM and asks for a structured review
The frontend is a single static page — risk gauge, severity-colored clause cards, copy-to-clipboard report
Nothing is stored. No signup. Free to use.
Open source (MIT): https://github.com/rahulatrkm/clauseclear

Getting the model to reliably return clean JSON (instead of chatty preamble or
truncated output) was the fiddly part — solved with a strict "output only JSON"
contract, reasoning-strip, truncated-JSON repair, and retries.