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Noesis — reading copilot

A small web app that reads PDFs and answers questions with inline citations. Built to learn RAG pipelines end-to-end.

Year
2025
Role
Solo side project
Stack
Next.js · Python · OpenAI
Status
Live

What it is

Noesis is a web interface for reading academic and technical PDFs. You upload a document, it extracts and embeds the text, and then you can ask questions about it — answers come back with the exact paragraph they were drawn from.

Why I built it

I spend a lot of time reading papers for class and it felt natural to build a small tool that would help me triangulate between a dozen tabs. Keeping it grounded in citations was the whole point — I don't want an assistant that hallucinates when I'm trying to learn.

What I learned

Embeddings, vector stores, chunking strategies, and how brittle RAG can be without good source-grounding. Also: the front-end is half the product — a well-designed reading surface changes how the tool feels entirely.