PathLyst

Inspiration

Career research is overwhelming-endless tabs, outdated advice, and generic job boards make it hard to find trustworthy, personalized guidance. We wanted to build a tool that gives anyone instant, research-grade career insights, tailored to their unique background and goals, powered by real-time AI.

What it does

PathLyst is an AI-powered career research assistant. Users enter their background, skills, interests, and a career question. PathLyst generates a comprehensive, easy-to-read report covering role descriptions, required skills, salary insights, job market trends, and curated learning resources. All sources are cited and clickable, including web articles and YouTube videos.

How we built it

• Frontend: Next.js (App Router), React, Tailwind CSS, Framer Motion for animation and smooth transitions.
• Backend: Next.js API routes.
• AI Integration: Perplexity Sonar-Pro API (with web and YouTube tools enabled) for real-time, trustworthy research.
• Features: Multi-step form, animated UI, session-based result storage, and dynamic rendering of citations and embedded media.

Challenges we ran into

• Prompt Engineering: Crafting prompts that consistently yield structured, skimmable, and source-rich responses from the Perplexity API.
• Citation Handling: Parsing and rendering diverse citation types (web, YouTube, PDF, Twitter) in a user-friendly way.
• API Rate Limits: Managing API usage and error handling for a smooth user experience.
• UI Polish: Balancing a modern, animated interface with accessibility and performance.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Seamless integration with Perplexity Sonar-Pro for up-to-date, trustworthy answers.
• Highly personalized, actionable career insights with direct links to resources.
• A delightful, modern UI that makes career research engaging and easy.
• Robust handling of various citation types, including embedded YouTube and Twitter content.

What we learned

• The power of real-time AI search for career guidance.
• How to design prompts and UI for clarity, trust, and user empowerment.
• Best practices for integrating third-party AI APIs in a production-ready app.
• The importance of actionable, cited information for user trust

Built With

• aceternity-ui
• lucide-react
• magicui
• motion
• nextjs
• perplexity-sonar
• react
• showdown
• tailwind