PolicyLens

What it does

PolicyLens lets you search any bill in Congress and get a plain English breakdown instantly. What it does, who it affects, what changes from current law. It then shows you how the left, center, and right each interpret the same bill, and highlights the specific provisions where the disagreement is sharpest. There's also a personal impact calculator where you enter your income, state, and job and it tells you how the bill affects you specifically.

How we built it

We built it with Next.js for the frontend and used the Mistral AI API to analyze bill text and generate the perspective breakdowns. Bill data comes from the official Congress.gov API.

Challenges we ran into

Getting the AI to stay neutral was harder than expected. We had to do a lot of prompt engineering to make sure it was representing each political perspective fairly rather than just defaulting to one framing. We also ran into issues with the Congress.gov API not supporting keyword search the way we expected, so we had to build our own title filtering on top of it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The perspective split view actually works well. Showing the same bill through three different lenses without it feeling biased is a hard problem and we think we got close. The personal impact calculator is also something we're proud of since it makes policy feel real instead of abstract.

What we learned

Neutrality is genuinely hard. Every word choice in a political summary carries some framing. We also learned that most people's mental model of how a bill becomes law is pretty fuzzy, which made us realize the plain English breakdown might actually be the most valuable part of the product.