Hello and welcome! In this post I'm going to tell you the whole story of my AI PDF reader – like, how I built it and the reasons why. This project was a pretty wild ride with some tough challenges and fun wins, and seeing it finally work just how I wanted is awesome!

I’m a huge Andrej Karpathy fan (the guy who invented the term vibe coding) and pretty much watch all his videos. One time, while I was watching his “How I use LLMs” video, he said that he wished there was a tool to make reading PDFs way easier. That just clicked for me! I read a lot of AI papers (about how different AI systems are built), and I often get stuck on tricky parts. The idea of highlighting text and getting help right away to understand it? That sounded awesome!

He specifically imagined a tool where you could highlight text in the PDF and get AI explanations. He actually talks about the idea right here!

So, I decided to give it a shot!

This was my very first desktop app using Electron, so for some of the harder parts, I vibe coded it – you know, working with an AI (Claude 3.7 via Cursor) helping me along. I definitely used this chance to understand these frameworks better, and now they don’t seem as confusing as before! I also learned that vibe coding isn’t as easy as it looks. You have to explain everything super clearly to the AI, and sometimes it would just get stuck, meaning I’d have to dive in and figure things out. Getting the UI to work was awesome! But sometimes trying to fix one tiny bug would just make a bunch of new ones pop up – so frustrating! Still, I learned a ton about Electron, npm and JavaScript. I even got used to using Git branches, which was super helpful for trying new stuff without breaking everything. And when I had a stable version, I learned how to make GitHub Releases so people could actually download and use the app! Looking back it was a really great experience and I learned so much!

I really hope this can be a useful tool for students, researchers, or anyone who wants to read PDFs more efficiently. You can find the project, download the app, and see all the code on my GitHub page: AI PDF reader
If you think it’s cool or useful, starring the project on GitHub would mean the world to me! It helps other people find it and really motivates me to keep building new things. I’d also love to hear what you think or if you have any ideas!

Thanks for reading and checking out my project!