Veris

Truth matters

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Veris - Bringing Back Trusted News in the Digital Age

Inspiration

Newspapers are obsolete. Social media and blogs—invented for entertainment—are now our primary news sources. Over 50% of adults get news from social media (Reuters), where misinformation spreads faster than truth.

The problem: We lost the trusted newspaper model. Authentic companies verified every story before publishing. Now anyone can post anything, and fake news thrives.

My dream for the past year: Bring back old-style journalism, modernized with AI. A digital newspaper where every story is AI-verified in real-time.

The challenge: I never had time to start—until Kiroween. With Kiro, I built in 1 week what I thought would take months.

What it does

Veris is a complete AI-powered fact-checking ecosystem with 3 core services:

🗞️ Web App (Next.js) - Vintage newspaper interface with page-flipping animations and Halloween theme. Every story is AI-verified with confidence scores and source citations. Infinite scroll feed updates in real-time.

🤖 AI Agent Service (Python) - Implements ClaimCheck (state-of-the-art research from UT Arlington) using Google ADK, OpenAI GPT-4, and Gemini. Multi-agent system extracts claims, verifies against authoritative sources using tiered source strategy, and assigns confidence scores. Deployed on Google Cloud Run.

🔍 Crawler Service (TypeScript) - Interactive web UI for manual content curation. Select RSS feeds (BBC, The Guardian, Times of India) or Reddit posts (r/worldnews, r/news, r/india), review fetched content, choose items to verify, and send to AI agent. Full control over what gets fact-checked.

Result: Old-style trusted journalism meets cutting-edge AI technology.

How we built it

Kiro was a game-changer. I built a Next.js web app, TypeScript crawler service, and Python AI agent using Google ADK—all in just one week, totaling 6,200+ lines of code across 3 integrated services.

Kiro Features Used:

Kiro Spec - Structured development with requirements → design → implementation. Kiro understood the entire system context across all 3 services.

Steering Docs - Custom guidelines for code quality, UI/UX, and architecture. Automatically included in every conversation, ensuring consistent code without repeating myself.

Agent Hooks - Automated type checks, documentation, schema validation, and tests. Eliminated repetitive tasks and boosted productivity.

Neon MCP Server - Direct database access. This eliminated manual back-and-forth with the database. Kiro could query the live schema and generate matching code autonomously.

Structured Prompting - I structured conversations with context → do → avoid → requirements, and told Kiro to ask instead of guessing. This produced clean, maintainable code.

The "Wow Moment"

I asked Kiro to "create the database schema for verified claims." It connected to my Neon PostgreSQL instance via MCP, created all tables with proper indexes, generated TypeScript types matching the schema, built the repository layer, and added error handling—all perfectly integrated without any additional help from me.

What would have taken hours was done in minutes, flawlessly.

Tech Stack

Next.js 14, React, TypeScript, Python, Google ADK, OpenAI GPT-4, Gemini, Node.js, Neon PostgreSQL, Vercel, Google Cloud Run

Result: 6,200 lines across 3 services in 1 week.

Challenges we ran into

ClaimCheck Implementation - Translating academic research into production code required orchestrating multiple AI models, web scraping tools, and parallel evidence gathering. The original paper used Ollama; I ported it to OpenAI/Gemini.

Multi-Service Coordination - Keeping 3 services aligned with shared types and APIs. Kiro Spec kept everything in sync.

Database Schema Evolution - Keeping schema in sync as requirements changed. Neon MCP server automated this completely.

Real-Time Performance - Achieving 2-3 minute verification while maintaining accuracy required parallelizing source gathering with ThreadPoolExecutor.

Iterative Refinement - Implementing ClaimCheck's 3-iteration evidence gathering loop with duplicate detection and reasoning synthesis.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

✅ Year-Long Dream → 1 Week Reality - Built a complete startup MVP thanks to Kiro

✅ 6,200 Lines in 1 Week - 3 integrated services: Next.js web app, Python AI agent with ClaimCheck, TypeScript crawler

✅ Research-to-Production - Ported ClaimCheck research paper (UT Arlington) from Ollama to OpenAI/Gemini with full iterative refinement pipeline

✅ Production-Ready - Deployed on Google Cloud Run, fully functional with interactive content curation

✅ Beautiful UX - Vintage newspaper interface that brings back trusted journalism

✅ Startup-Ready - First version complete, ready to bring to market

What we learned

Kiro Enables Solo Founders - With Kiro, a solo developer can build production-ready systems at team velocity. This democratizes startup creation.

Spec + Steering + Hooks + MCP = 10x Productivity - All four features were equally impactful. Spec provided structure, Steering ensured quality, Hooks automated tasks, and MCP eliminated manual work.

Structured Prompting Matters - Context → Do → Avoid → Requirements format, plus asking Kiro to ask questions instead of guessing, produced exceptional code.

AI Pair Programming is Ready - Building a year-long dream in 1 week proves AI pair programming is ready for serious product development and startup creation.

What's next for Veris

Immediate: User testing, performance optimization, mobile app

Q1 2026: Launch beta with 1,000 users, integrate more fact-checking sources

Q2 2026: User accounts, community features, partnerships with news organizations

Q3 2026: Premium subscriptions ($4.99-$9.99/month), physical newspaper ($29.99/month), API access

Long-Term: Become the "Wikipedia of fact-checking." Replace social media news feeds with trusted, AI-verified content. Build this into a successful startup that brings back trusted journalism in the digital age.

Live Demo: veris.luex.shop
Built with Kiro in 1 week for Kiroween Hackathon 🎃

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