This is a submission for the World's Largest Hackathon Writing Challenge: Building with Bolt.
Built the open-source GitHub project comparison tool the developer and founder ecosystem actually needs.
The Problem Hidden in Plain Sight 🔍
Open-source projects are not just codebases, many are the foundations of tomorrow's leading companies. By identifying and learning from these projects early, teams can avoid duplication, improve their product direction, and even collaborate to build something greater than the sum of its parts.
But here's the reality check :
• Developers waste time rebuilding existing features without knowing it 🔄
• GitHub lacks smart, semantic comparison tools and especially for product teams 🤷♂️
• We wanted to empower developers and founders to build smarter, faster, and more collaboratively 💡
Too many dev teams reinvent the wheel. We asked: What if your project could instantly benchmark itself against every open-source repo — feature by feature?
How many authentication systems get rebuilt daily? How many teams spend weeks on features that exist in 47 different flavors on GitHub? The solutions are there, but meaningful discovery feels impossible.
Then Bolt.new's hackathon appeared. Finally – the perfect opportunity to convert this persistent idea into reality with fast MVP development!
Meet ⚡Productive AI: The Wheel-Reinvention Detector 🔍
Instead of another todo app, We built something that solves actual developer pain:
Productive AI compares your project with open-source repos and delivers:
- 📊 Similarity scores (because we love meaningful numbers)
- 🔀 Feature comparisons (what you have, what you're missing, what you over-engineered)
- 🏆 Competitive analysis (aka reality checks for your "unique" idea)
- 💚 Repository status checks (no more comparing to digital graveyards)
Real impact: Save weeks of development time, discover better implementations, avoid duplicate work, make data-driven decisions. ✨
The Magic Stack That Made It Happen ⚙️
- Bolt.new 🤖 - MVP acceleration (the real MVP here)
- Next.js ⚛️ - Frontend framework
- Cohere AI 🧠 - Semantic understanding that goes beyond keyword matching
- GitHub API 🐙 - Live repository data pipeline
Bolt.new: The MVP Accelerator That Changed Everything ⚡
Here's where the magic happened. We had crystal-clear vision of what the developer ecosystem needed, but building it from scratch felt like climbing Everest in flip-flops. Database schemas, API architecture, deployment pipelines – the setup overhead was paralyzing. 😰
Bolt.new transformed the game entirely. With Bolt's fast MVP development capabilities, what used to take weeks of setup happened in hours. The tool didn't just help me build faster – it helped me build smarter by handling the infrastructure while I focused on creating genuine value for developers. 🎯
The "This Can't Be Real" Challenges 😅
🗂️ GitHub Data is Chaotic
Extracting features from README files and repositories is like finding coherent plots in action movies. Some repos have beautiful docs, others have "TODO: Write documentation" as their entire README. 📝
🧠 Making Use of AI
💡 Instead of manually defining relationships, I used AI to semantically analyse feature descriptions from API responses.
🔍 The AI identified that terms like "login system" and "user authentication" are similar, while clearly distinguishing "authentication" from "authorization."
🧠 No custom training — just smart use of AI's contextual understanding to capture real-world feature relationships.
Why Productive AI Matters Beyond Cool Tech 🎯
This isn't just another developer tool. It's not just for developers — it's for founders, product teams, and visionaries who need to understand the landscape before writing a single line of code. Here's the real market impact: 📈
- 🔄 Eliminate Duplicate Effort: Teams can instantly discover if their "innovative" feature already exists in mature form
- 📈 Accelerate Market Entry: New startups can learn from established solutions instead of starting from zero
- 💡 Identify Market Gaps: Find underserved niches by analyzing what's missing from existing solutions
- 🤝 Enable Strategic Collaboration: Connect teams building complementary solutions
- 📊 Drive Data-Driven Architecture: Choose technologies based on real-world usage patterns, not hype
- ⏰ Optimize Resource Allocation: Focus engineering time on unique value instead of reinventing basics
Real-world scenario: A fintech startup could instantly see how their payment processing compares to established open-source solutions, identify security patterns they haven't considered, and discover integration opportunities – all before writing their first line of code. 💳
Productive AI brings semantic understanding to this chaos. 🌟
See It In Action! 🎥
Live App : [https://productiveai.netlify.app/]
Watch the full demo and build walkthrough:
[https://youtu.be/Qp6UAzasRKU?si=t67RCXGqa9uRt3NJ]
Dive Into the Code 🔍
Want to see the code and contribute?
[https://github.com/extinctsion/productiveai]
The Bottom Line 🎯
The developer ecosystem doesn't need more reinvented wheels. It needs tools that help us build on each other's work more effectively. That's exactly what Productive AI delivers. 🛠️
Have you ever rebuilt something that already existed? How do you currently discover similar projects? Share your thoughts below! 💬
Top comments (4)
Cool project. I must try it out!
This is super useful. Most devs don’t realize how much time they lose rebuilding features that already exist. Love how Productive AI brings real structure and clarity to open-source comparisons.
Thanks for the appreciation! This is exactly why we built ProductiveAI - to solve the problem of developers and founders reinventing the wheel when great open-source solutions already exist.
We're always open to feedback and collaboration. If you have ideas for improving the platform or want to contribute to making open-source discovery even better, we'd love to hear from you!
You're welcome!
It’s a much-needed tool, and you’ve done a great job addressing a real problem. Looking forward to seeing how Productive AI evolves!