Devlog #Final – DeepRead is Done (Finally)

I can’t believe I’m actually writing this. After weeks of “just one more bug” and “why is this not working”, DeepRead is actually complete. Like, functional complete. Not “it works on my machine” complete.

The idea was dead simple from the start — I just wanted something that reads my PDFs and gives me a summary so I don’t have to. That’s it. Didn’t think it would turn into this whole thing.

But man, the number of times this project almost broke me…

The biggest headache was the AI APIs. I started with Gemini because it was the easiest to set up. Worked great for like two days. Then the quota limits hit. Every. Single. Time. So I had to completely restructure the backend to support multiple providers. Now it tries Groq first, falls back to OpenRouter, and if both fail, Gemini is the last resort. Took way too long to get this right but honestly it’s the most solid part of the app now.

Then there was the JSON parsing nightmare. You’d think AI models would return clean JSON when you ask them to. They don’t. They really don’t. Sometimes there’d be extra text before the JSON, sometimes missing brackets, sometimes completely wrong format. Spent hours writing fallback parsers for that stuff.

And don’t even get me started on the frontend. There was this one bug where the flashcards would show data from a PREVIOUS PDF. Took me an entire evening to figure out I wasn’t clearing state properly. Fun times.

What’s actually in it right now:

• PDF upload (shockingly, this was the easiest part)
• AI summary generation
• AI flashcards with prev/next navigation
• Multiple AI fallback system (the thing I’m most proud of ngl)
• Simple frontend — HTML, CSS, vanilla JS
• FastAPI backend

No frameworks, no unnecessary complexity. Just works.

What I want to add later:

• Dark mode (I keep procrastinating on this)
• PDF preview so you don’t have to open it separately
• Highlighting key sections
• Quiz mode — flip the flashcards into actual questions
• Export summary as PDF or Markdown
• User accounts to save study history
• DOCX and PPT support
• Better loading states and error messages (currently they’re… basic)

This project started because I was lazy and didn’t want to read long PDFs. But it ended up teaching me more than most tutorials ever did. Real debugging, real API integration problems, real “why is CORS blocking this when it worked yesterday” energy.

If you’re thinking about building something like this — just start. You’ll hate it at points, but you’ll learn so much.

Anyway, that’s the devlog. DeepRead v1.0 is done. Time to actually use it for my studies now 😅

Thanks for following along. 🚀