Inspiration Most people feel shut out of politics — not because they don't care, but because legislation is written for lawyers, not humans. We wanted to build something that answers the question nobody in government asks: "What does this actually mean for me?" A housing bill should not just be a PDF. It should tell a first-time buyer in Texas exactly how their mortgage payment changes. Legiscope started from a simple frustration: policy affects everything in your life, but nothing translates it into your life.
How It Works LegiScope ingests RSS civic feeds and Congress.gov bills into a single normalized schema. The Claude API takes each item plus your personal profile and generates a concrete, numbered real-world impact scenario Items are stored locally in JSON — no accounts, no cloud, full data ownership User feedback (Interested / Not Interested) is recorded and shapes future card ordering
What We Learned Building Legiscope taught us that the hardest part of civic tech is not fetching data: it is making it personally meaningful without being misleading. We learned how to prompt Claude to reason about policy impact with honest uncertainty built in, not just generate confident-sounding predictions. We also learned that people engage far more with "your rent could rise $180/month" than with "the bill affects housing affordability."
Challenges The biggest challenge was honesty at scale. It is easy to generate confident impact predictions — it is much harder to make Claude acknowledge uncertainty, present tradeoffs fairly, and avoid nudging users toward any political conclusion. We iterated heavily on the system prompt until outputs felt like a knowledgeable friend explaining policy, not a pundit selling a position.
The second challenge was keeping it offline-first. We wanted zero required accounts so anyone could run it. Building a custom environment variable parser, designing a local deduplication system, and making the Congress.gov integration optional while keeping the core product valuable required careful architectural design.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.