← Back to Sourced

Methodology

Every idea in the feed starts as a real complaint, not a generated headline. Here's exactly how a post on a forum becomes a build brief — and what gets thrown out along the way.

Where ideas come from

Five sources, one more on the way

Every signal is a real post, question, issue, or article — pulled daily, deduped on URL, and never paraphrased before storage.

Hacker News

Posts and comments matching pain phrases like "wish there was" or "looking for a tool", above a minimum points threshold.

StackExchange

Barely-answered questions on Webmasters, Software Recs, UX, PM, and other workflow-focused sites — an unanswered question is often an unmet need.

GitHub Issues

Feature requests and complaints on a curated list of high-traffic dev-infrastructure and app-building repos.

Dev.to

Posts tagged discuss, watercooler, or help — Dev.to's venting/opinion tags, above a minimum reactions and comments bar.

Lobsters

Stories above a minimum score and comment count, on the same complaint-prose register as Hacker News.

Reddit · not active yet

The poller is built and wired into the daily cron, but isn't live yet — it's waiting on Reddit API credentials before it starts contributing signals.

How we filter

The bar, not vibes

This is the actual reason ideas here come with evidence attached instead of just sounding plausible.

  1. 1Every signal is embedded (OpenRouter, text-embedding-3-small) and compared against every other signal by cosine similarity. Two signals above 0.82 similarity are folded into the same cluster — they're treated as describing the same underlying problem, regardless of the words either author used.
  2. 2A cluster only qualifies once it has 3+ signals from 2+ different platforms. One angry HN post isn't evidence of demand — the same complaint showing up independently on, say, StackExchange and GitHub is a much stronger signal that it's a real, shared problem rather than one person's bad day.
  3. 3A human reviews every qualifying cluster at /admin/pending before it's drafted into a brief and published — clearing the bar gets a cluster in front of a reviewer, it doesn't auto-publish anything.
Live numbers

Right now, from the database

Queried fresh on every page load — including the zeros, if that's what's true today.

370
Signals ingested
5
Sources active
17
Clusters formed
1
Clusters passing the bar
1
Briefs published

Curious what didn't make it? See every rejected cluster →

Pipeline health

Last 5 draft-pass runs

No pipeline runs recorded yet — the draft-ideas cron writes here after each pass.