How I Built an AI Exam App in 8 Months to outsource studying

Eight months ago, a CS exam forced me to write pseudocode when I already knew how to code. Instead of studying, I rage-built an app. Today examintelligence.app is live. Here’s exactly how I got here—from vibe-coded POCs to a production hybrid AI pipeline—without the curated startup gloss. The Philosophy Behind the Build I’ve always believed studying for marks ≠ actually learning. When I was first introduced to organic chemistry, I hated it. Then I ran into GNNs in Machine Learning with PyTorch and Scikit-Learn , paired with the MoleculeNet dataset. Suddenly, everything clicked. I wanted to learn everything about it. That’s the core problem: exams optimize for pattern recognition, not curiosity. You’re forced down one prescribed path, and it rm -rf s the fun of learning in most cases. So one week before my first prelims, I decided to build exam intelligence. The plan was simple: introduce brutal efficiency using AI for what it’s actually built for: pattern recognition Parse every past paper, mark scheme, and examiner report. Distill it down to precisely what matters. Free up time for coding and creative work. Vibe-Coding the POC (and Why It Collapsed) I’m generally against vibe-coding. It’s unreliable, hard to maintain, and a security nightmare. But with prelims staring me in the face, I had no choice. I opened Claude and vibe-coded it module by module. The only code review I had time for was checking for suspicious os.system or subprocess calls. That was it. I shipped anyway. Initial stack: Gemini API (no agent frameworks, no LangGraph) Streamlit frontend PostgreSQL It validated my idea but functionally, it barely held together. After prelims, I finally looked at what the AI had actually built: Dashboard showing random stats Asked Gemini for a JSON response with 5 keys, saved only 2 Randomly created DB tables while trying to read subjects The kind of code you end up with when you let an AI cook unsupervised for a week. So I did the only reasonable thing: opened Neov