Uncognito

Inspiration

We wanted to build the opposite of a normal productivity app. Instead of quietly helping you focus, Uncognito creates funny social pressure by catching your distractions and turning them into public roast material.

What it does

Uncognito is an opt-in browser accountability app. A Chrome extension can capture your current tab, send the screenshot to a backend, generate a short AI roast, and display it on a shareable Wall of Shame page. For demos, it also supports a manual “Roast me now” flow and a LinkedIn share-link flow.

How we built it

We built a monorepo with a Manifest V3 Chrome extension, a Next.js web portal, backend service scaffolding, and an OpenAI-powered roast generator. The extension handles capture and upload flow, the AI service turns screenshots into short captions, and the web app renders public roast pages with share-ready metadata.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was balancing the joke with user control. Screenshots are sensitive, so we kept the product opt-in, disabled by default, and focused on clear manual demo paths. We also had to keep LinkedIn sharing simple by using share links instead of unreliable API posting.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud that the core idea is immediately understandable and demoable: capture a tab, generate a roast, and show it publicly. We also built the project with clear agent ownership, testable services, and a working local web experience instead of just a mockup.

What we learned

We learned that funny products still need serious boundaries. Even a prank app needs consent, rate limits, deletion paths, and careful handling of screenshots. We also learned how useful it is to separate the extension, AI, storage, social, and web responsibilities early.

What's next for Uncognito

Next we want to connect the full upload pipeline end to end, add real persisted roast records, improve screenshot safety controls, and make the Wall of Shame update live. After that, we’d add optional approval queues, more share destinations, and stronger privacy redaction.

Built With

• next.js
• node.js
• react
• supabase
• typescript
• vercel