ScholarLens

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✨ About the Project: Scholar Lens Scholar Lens is a research assistant designed to help anyone understand academic papers — fast. Users paste in text from academic papers and choose a tone (like “layperson” or “blog-style”) to instantly get a clear, tailored summary and keywords. The goal is to make research more approachable, especially for those outside academia.

💡 Inspiration I'm not a developer — I work in the scholarly publishing industry. Day in, day out, I see people struggle to make sense of dense, technical writing. Whether it's students trying to grasp methodology or journalists hunting for a punchy quote, academic content is often impenetrable.

So I thought: what if I just tried to fix it myself?

Despite having no technical background, I decided to learn on the fly and create something that would genuinely help real people understand important ideas.

I only found out about this hackathon on June 27th, and with a full time job and childcare responsibilities, I could only work on it in the evenings. Even with those limits, I managed to ship a functioning MVP.

🛠️ How I Built It Frontend: React (via Bolt), built from scratch. Originally supported PDF uploads, but moved to a simple text input interface for speed and stability.

Backend: Supabase for:

Auth and user management

Role-Based Access with RLS

Usage tracking via stored procedures

Edge Functions (Supabase):

Handle summarization securely via OpenAI API

Enforce user-specific limits and models (GPT-3.5 vs GPT-4)

OpenAI:

Generates summaries and keywords using dynamic, tone-aware prompts

Deployment: Deployed via Netlify with environment variables securely passed from Supabase

🧩 Key Features Paste any academic text (soon: upload PDFs for premium users)

Choose tone: layperson, academic, ELI5, blog-style, social, etc.

GPT-4 support for premium users

Usage tracking and limits (via Supabase RPC)

Summaries + structured keyword output

Clean UI and user onboarding

🚧 Challenges I Faced 🧪 1. PDF Upload & Parsing Originally, users could upload PDF files, and the backend (a Supabase Edge Function) would extract and summarize them. But Supabase’s Deno environment struggled with pdfjs-dist, causing module parsing errors and timeouts.

Solution: I moved PDF parsing to the frontend using pdfjs-dist, but eventually decided to simplify and temporarily remove upload support, focusing on copy-paste input for this MVP.

Silver lining: This made me realize that PDF upload should be a premium feature, unlocking higher-tier value while keeping the free tier clean and stable.

🔐 2. Supabase Auth Timeouts Supabase sessions were hanging in Bolt and Netlify due to network restrictions and auth state race conditions.

Fixes:

Custom retry logic

Fallback timeouts

More resilient AuthContext handling

Detailed logging with emojis (✅📡🔍) for real-time feedback

🕓 3. Time & Experience This was probably the biggest challenge of all.

I started 3 days before the deadline

I’m a solo builder

I’ve never coded professionally

I have young children and a full time day job

But I shipped anyway.

I’ve learned Supabase, React, Edge Functions, and AI prompt engineering — all within a few intense nights of hacking.

📚 What I Learned You don’t need to be a dev to solve a real problem

Supabase is powerful, but requires careful setup (especially RLS + Edge Functions)

OpenAI can do amazing things — but only if you ask it right

Clean UX is essential when async processes are involved

Logging and visibility make or break debugging

✅ Outcome In just a few days, I built a working MVP that:

Converts complex academic papers into clear summaries

Tailors summaries to different tones and user types

Tracks usage limits

Supports GPT-4 for premium users

Is deployed and live — and already working on mobile!

🌱 What's Next? Reintroduce PDF upload as a premium-only feature

Add citation context and auto-title detection

Ship a full onboarding flow

Add Stripe for premium upgrades

Extend summaries into tweet threads, blog posts, and more

👋 Final Thoughts This project was born from real pain points in my industry. I didn't wait for someone to build it. I taught myself what I needed and just started.

I'm proud that someone with no technical background, childcare constraints, and only a few days of hacking built this.

Thanks for the opportunity 🙏

Built With

• bolt
• netlify
• openai
• stripe
• supabase