BriefMe

Long meeting notes, dense research papers, endless reports — I kept drowning in documents and losing the thread of what actually mattered. BriefMe started as a simple question: what if you could paste any document into one page and get back a crisp, structured brief in seconds?

What it does

• Paste or type any document into a clean, distraction-free editor.
• One click generates a structured brief: a TL;DR summary, key points, action items, and open questions — returned as clean JSON from the Gemini API and rendered instantly.
• Sample documents included so judges can try it in seconds without finding their own text.
• Graceful offline demo mode: if no API key is configured, the app runs a clearly labelled local fallback so the full flow is still demonstrable.

How I built it

I followed the Devpost Learn Skill Pack process step by step. The 1-start skill interview forced me to define the problem, the user, and the scope before writing a single line of code — the planning docs (scope.md, prd.md, spec.md) live in the repository's devpost/ folder. I then built a minimal Node.js + Express + TypeScript backend that calls the Google Gemini API with a strict structured-output prompt, and a vanilla HTML/CSS/JS frontend with no framework at all. The result is a small app that runs end-to-end and does exactly one thing well.

Challenges I ran into

• Getting consistent structured output from the LLM. Free-form summaries are easy; reliable JSON with the same four sections every time is not. I iterated on the prompt and added validation + repair logic.
• Keeping it honest. The offline fallback had to be clearly labelled so a judge never mistakes demo output for a real AI brief — that took deliberate UI work.
• Scope discipline. The skill pack's planning docs kept me from gold-plating: no auth, no database, no framework. Just the brief.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

• A genuinely useful one-thing app: paste text, get a brief. Nothing else to learn.
• Planning before building — the PRD and spec meant almost no rewrites during implementation.
• It works with zero configuration: open the page, load a sample, click one button.

What I learned

• How to coax structured, reliable JSON out of an LLM with prompt design and output validation.
• That planning docs (scope/PRD/spec) save more time than they cost, especially when an AI is writing the code.
• That the smallest shippable thing — one page, one button, one result — beats a feature list.

What's next for BriefMe

• File upload (PDF/DOCX) and URL import.
• Export briefs as Markdown/PDF.
• Brief history and shareable links.
• Custom brief templates (e.g. meeting notes vs. research paper).

Built With

• css
• devpost-learn-skill-pack
• express.js
• gemini
• html
• javascript
• node.js
• typescript