The problem SophistAI solves

Information Overload: Syllabi are often dense, lengthy documents filled with information that can be overwhelming, especially when trying to quickly grasp the key concepts and their relationships.

Disorganized Learning: Traditional study methods often involve jumping between textbooks, online articles, and notes, leading to a fragmented and inefficient learning experience. It's hard to see the "big picture."

Lack of Context: Understanding how individual topics fit into the overall course structure is crucial for effective learning, but this context is often missing when studying isolated concepts.

Wasted Time: Students spend valuable time organizing materials, searching for relevant information, and trying to connect disparate concepts, time that could be better spent on actual learning and comprehension.

Anxiety and Procrastination: The feeling of being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information can lead to anxiety and procrastination, hindering academic performance.

Challenges we ran into

One challenge was creating the mind map UI, which required extensive Reactflow knowledge and documentation browsing.

Deployment was a hassle, since we are using Tanstack Start, a framework currently in beta.

Cloudflare AI Workers had some trouble with providing structured JSON output, as well as a bit of a kink in the maximum token limit for the free tier.

Designing the UI, the logos, and the colors (color theory is hard) was an immense task that took up more time than expected, but it was necessary since our UI is top notch.