Inspiration
At the start of DiamondHacks, we brainstorm ideas — and spent the first hour worrying: "Has this been built before?" We kept second-guessing ourselves, manually Googling and scrolling through Devpost with no real answer. That frustration marked the start of our project. We wanted a tool that could answer that question in seconds, not hours — so we built Check-It-Tron.
What it does
Check-It-Tron is a real-time hackathon idea originality analyzer. You type your idea as free text or paste a Devpost project URL, and our Browser Use AI agent autonomously crawls Devpost and GitHub live — no static database, no stale index. It returns a Hype Score from 0 to 100, classifying your idea as a Pioneer (rare, go build it), Trending (popular but winnable), or Saturated (needs a pivot). The higher the score, the more common and saturated the idea is across recent hackathon projects. Alongside the score, you get a list of similar past projects with similarity percentages, real-time trend signals, and three specific upgrade suggestions to make your idea stand out.
The Hype Score is calculated using three real-time signals from the live web: similarity, frequency, and recency. We measure how closely your idea matches existing projects by comparing descriptions and features found on Devpost and GitHub, then analyze how often similar ideas appear to estimate saturation. We also prioritize recently built projects to capture current trends rather than outdated ones. By combining these factors, Check-It-Tron quantifies not just whether your idea exists, but how common and competitive it is in today’s hackathon landscape.
How we built it
The backend is a FastAPI server in Python. The core is a Browser Use Cloud agent that receives a task prompt describing exactly what to search, crawls Devpost search results and GitHub live, then returns structured JSON with all findings. Claude processes the raw signals and generates the hype score, verdict, and upgrade suggestions. The frontend is a custom dark terminal-style dashboard that visualizes the results — including a hype meter bar, similar project cards with similarity scores, and trend signals.
Challenges we ran into
The biggest challenge was getting the Browser Use agent to return consistently structured JSON. The agent would sometimes wrap output in markdown or add extra commentary, so we built a robust parsing layer with regex cleanup and JSON extraction as a fallback. We also had to carefully engineer the task prompt — being too vague gave generic results, too specific caused the agent to miss relevant projects. Getting that balance right took several iterations.
On the frontend, managing loading states for an async agent that takes 30–60 seconds required thoughtful UX so users didn't think the app had crashed.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud that Check-It-Tron actually works on real ideas in real time — no mock data, no pre-scraped index. The Browser Use agent genuinely browses the web live every time. We're also proud of the meta-moment: we ran Check-It-Tron on itself mid-hackathon and got a "Trending" verdict with a score of 28 — which meant we still had room to win, and it pushed us to add the upgrade suggestions feature on the spot.
What we learned
We learned how powerful Browser Use is as an agent-based building block, replacing what would normally be a complex scraping pipeline with a single natural language task.
We also learned that prompt engineering is critical — small wording changes significantly affected the quality and consistency of the agent’s output.
Finally, we learned that agent systems require a balance between autonomy and control — allowing flexible exploration of the web while still enforcing structured, reliable outputs.
What's next for Check-It-Tron
- Expand data sources beyond Devpost — add Devfolio, GitHub Topics, and HackerNews Show HN
- Add a "Patent Search" mode for startup founders validating product ideas
- Build a team-facing dashboard where multiple ideas can be compared side by side
- Deploy as a public tool available before every major hackathon season
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