The Professor (Academic Explainer)
A VS Code extension that explains your selected code four different ways, backed by Gemini. Three days, three people, and won the First Hack Category at YCP Hacks 2025.
Bealu's idea. I took the backend: the Gemini connection, and the heuristics for which code actually needs to go into a request, because a session that re-sends a whole file on every question can get really expensive fast.
What we really cared about was the contract. An explainer that answers in a different
shape every time is worse than no explainer, so each of the four modes —
summary, Big-O, line-by-line, and explain-it-to-a-five-year-old — maps to
exactly one heading and nothing else. The mode directive is a switch that
ends in an assignment to never, so adding a fifth mode is a compile error
rather than a request that quietly carries no instruction.
Three of us, three days, first in its category at YCP Hacks 2025.