Shodh is live on GitHub pages (which I did learn from Gen-AIs). Try it on any subreddit where people complain about things. That’s most of them including me of course.
I started with a stopwatch and a plan to find three ideas on Reddit.
That’s it. Simple enough. Go on Reddit, find problems people are complaining about, pick three that feel interesting to build. Shouldn’t take long.
Forty-five minutes later I’d read seventeen comment threads, gotten into a debate about SaaS pricing, watched two video recommendations I did not ask for, and had zero ideas worth anything. Classic Reddit. The algorithm doesn’t want you to leave with something useful. It wants you to stay.
So I stopped. Closed the tab. Opened ChatGPT.
And I said: I need a distraction-free way to do this.
That conversation lasted maybe ten minutes. I sketched out what I wanted, input a subreddit, get back posts framed as problems or challenges, skip the ones that don’t interest me, save the ones that do. Simple triage. No feeds, no comments, no rabbit holes.
ChatGPT gave me a basic skeleton. I took it to Antigravity, started building, kept improving. Thirty-three minutes from that first message to a deployed, live tool.
I had the stopwatch running the whole time. Originally I’d started it to time how long it took me to find ideas on Reddit. It ended up timing how long it took me to build the tool to find them better.
What Shodh Actually Does
The tool is called Shodh (an idea scout really). Sanskrit for search, or inquiry.
It pulls posts from any subreddit you give it, filters by timeframe, hot, top today, this week, this month, all time, and surfaces them one at a time as challenges. You skip or accept. No noise. If something catches your eye and you want context, there’s a link to the original thread. Otherwise you just move through.
Under the hood it’s hitting Reddit’s API directly, filtering posts for friction-heavy signals, and surfacing each one with upvotes, comment count, and engagement ratio. The accepted tab lets you track status, add notes, and move ideas through a simple pipeline from Accepted to Started to Completed.
It broke a few times during the build.
The first version had a hardcoded list of subreddits and just kept looping the same posts. Had to add a proper input.
Then every time I added a new subreddit, instead of fetching posts it would print the instruction prompt back at me, literally outputting the code comment that said “scan this subreddit manually.”
Reddit’s API limitations meant some workarounds were messier than expected. But nothing stopped the build. Each break was a ten-minute fix, not a wall.
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What Actually Surprised Me
Not that the tool worked. But how close it felt.
Before, and I mean even six months ago, taking an idea from my head to something functional and live felt like kilometers away. You’d need to find a developer, brief them, wait, iterate, wait more. Or you’d learn to code yourself, which is its own years-long detour.
Now it’s centimeters. Not zero distance. But the gap has collapsed.
There’s still judgment involved. Still back-and-forth. Still moments where the AI confidently gives you something broken. But the distance between “I have this idea” and “this thing exists in the world” has shrunk in a way that most people haven’t fully felt yet.
Does It Actually Work Though?
That was the real question I sat with after building it.
I’ve used it since. Pulled ideas from several subreddits I care about. Accepted somewhere around ten or twelve. Two of them have genuinely changed what I’m building right now, not because they were revolutionary insights, but because they reminded me to start from what people are actually frustrated about, not from the product I imagine they want.
That reorientation matters. It’s easy to build for the idea in your head. Harder to build for the problem in someone else’s day.
It’s not just an idea collector. It’s a grounding mechanism.
That’s the use case I didn’t fully articulate when I was building it.
The Bigger Thing
A few years ago, if you needed a tool that did something specific for your workflow, you had two options. Find a generic app and spend weeks trying to bend it to your needs. Or hire someone to build what you actually wanted.
Now there’s a third option: build it yourself, in 33 minutes, tuned exactly to how your brain works.
Shodh doesn’t have features I don’t need. It doesn’t have a pricing page or a waitlist or a growth loop. It has one job: help me find ideas without getting lost. It does that job. For me. Because I built it for me.
That’s the shift. Not that AI can build things. That you can build things, faster than it used to take to find the right search term.
I think that’s what “I think it works” means. The tool works. But more than that, the approach works.
Now I just have to build the ten things Shodh told me to build.
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