TLDR

Your syllabus simplified. We eliminate the 'TL;DR' excuse by converting complex course documents into manageable information.

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Inspiration

As students, we've all been through "Sylly week", looking at a 10 paged document with complex grading scales, dozens of deadlines, and rigid policies, just to realize that this is the case for 4 other classes. We realized that the most important information gets buried under the academic jargon. We were inspired to build TLDR to cut through the noise, making a hub where a student could just drop a PDF and get the "too long; didn't read" version and move on with their day.

What it does

With TLDR students are able to add their classes or upload the syllabus if it does not exist within TLDR. The website then parses the Syllabi using Gemini and gives the user a summary of the important details of the class. The student is also able to prompt the AI about further questions they have that may not have already been answered within the pdf. We also included features to help students throughout the semester, such as a to-do list, calendar and a class discussion/review board so students will know more information about classes.

How we built it

We built the backend with Supabase and routed it with next.js. The frontend was built with React, tailwind, and prototyped with figma. We used python and Gemini AI to parse the syllabi.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest hurdle was integrating our Python-based Gemini backend with our Typescript frontend. When Vercel deployment failed to support our specific structure, we had to quickly learn and pivot to Railway in the final hours of the hackathon—a high-pressure situation that taught us the importance of deployment flexibility.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One of our main accomplishments that we are proud of is that we were able to expand this app much further than we originally planned, this experience was our team’s first time ever doing a hackathon, so being in an environment like this was very impressive.

What we learned

Beyond the workshops and the connections we made at SwampHacks, we learned more about the highs and lows of being a software engineer, from the joys of successfully deploying the project to the lows of being stuck on a bug for 5 hours. Given the task of creating something so big, yet under a very strict deadline gave us a lot of insight into how working for companies would be. A place where collaboration is necessary as each member of the team needs to work the best they can in order to produce something, in a situation where we can’t just walk away and return the next day, its something we have to tackle head on with everything we can.

What's next for TLDR

TLDR has a lot more left in store. With 36 hours, we were able to go much further than we originally planned, allowing us to brainstorm and incorporate more features. We have aims to sync TLDR with more calendars. We want to also add a grade prediction feature based on the students schedule and previous grades. Later we hope students from many other universities will be able to utilize this website, as well as professors who can upload their syllabi directly to the website for their students to view.

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