Cairn

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  Project Thumbnail

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  Landing Page - Dark Mode

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  Landing Page - Light Mode

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  Sign In Page

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  Dashboard- Dark Mode

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  Dashboard- Dark Mode

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  Dashboard- Light Mode

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  Courses Library

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  Review List

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  Friends Page

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  Global Scoreboard Page

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  Create a Course- Paste Text

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  Create a Course- File Upload

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  Settings Page

Inspiration

Learning online breaks in two ways: passive reading (you forget ~90% within a week) and rigid courses (you can't start from the article sitting in front of you right now). We built Cairn to collapse the distance between "I just read something interesting" and "I actually know it." The name is a trail cairn — a small stack of stones hikers leave to mark the path so no one gets lost. Cairn marks your learning path.

What it does

• Generate: paste an article URL, upload a doc, or type a topic — Cairn's AI turns it into a structured course. • Distill, don't copy: every lesson ends in a Key Takeaway — the core claim in plain language, with the filler stripped out. • Remember: spaced repetition moves lessons from new → due → mastered. • Prove it: quiz yourself with 10 / 20 / 30 / custom questions; harder courses are worth more. • Compete: earn difficulty-scaled points and climb a global leaderboard from Seedling to Cairn Master.

How we built it

• Next.js 14 (App Router) + TypeScript, with Tailwind for a calm, warm UI. • Supabase (Postgres + Auth + Row-Level Security) stores users, courses, progress, and the leaderboard. • A provider-agnostic AI layer (OpenRouter / Gemini-compatible) distills source material into summarized lessons and generates quizzes — with a graceful offline fallback so the app never hard-fails. • Deployed on Vercel; all scoring lives in one pure ranking module so points stay fair and testable.

Challenges we ran into

• Real summarization, not copy-paste. Early AI output just restated the source. We rewrote the distillation prompt and surfaced AI errors live until the lessons read like a human summary. • A dead API key on prod. The app went quiet mid-demo. We added an offline fallback and rotated keys without a redeploy. • Fair difficulty scaling. Beginner vs advanced courses needed points that feel earned — solved with a per-correct × level-multiplier (1× / 1.5× / 2×).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• A course generator that respects your time — distilled takeaways, not "restate in your own words" busywork. • A points system where an advanced course is genuinely worth more than a beginner one. • A global leaderboard that ranks every user via the service-role client without leaking anyone's private data.

What we learned

• Summarization quality lives or dies in the prompt — and in validating the output, not trusting it. • Cache-busting matters: a stale build cache once hid a feature we'd already shipped. • For actual retention, small calm UX beats gamified noise every time.

What's next for Cairn

• Public course sharing + community leaderboards. • Richer ingestion: PDF / ePub uploads and YouTube-transcript courses. • Adaptive quizzes that target your weakest lessons automatically.

Discord Username

VolarQuill

Built With

• ai/ml
• next.js
• openrouter
• postgresql
• supabase
• tailwind
• typescript
• vercel