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RepoRecon

RepoRecon turns complex GitHub repos into clear, interactive blueprints. Paste a URL to visualize architecture, detect bugs, and see security risks instantly with AI.

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💡 Inspiration

This project is specifically designed for the Hack for Hackers track to empower the developer community.

We live in the golden age of open source, but we’ve all faced the same problem: you find an incredible repository on GitHub, but it’s a total maze. You're met with fifty folders, a two-thousand-line README, and absolutely no clear starting point. We realized that the "cognitive load" of just understanding a codebase is the biggest barrier for junior developers trying to contribute and senior developers trying to audit new tools. We built RepoRecon to turn hours of manual exploration into seconds of visual clarity.

⚙️ What it does

RepoRecon is an AI-powered architectural analyst that instantly transforms massive, messy repositories into clear, interactive blueprints.

  • Smart URL Analysis: Simply paste any GitHub URL to begin the "Recon".
  • Context-Aware Summarization: Get a high-level overview of the project's motto, purpose, and tech stack.
  • Live Architecture Mapping: Automatically generates a Mermaid.js diagram visualizing the data flow and file relationships.
  • Security & Scalability Audit: Identifies hidden vulnerabilities and technical debt using the deep reasoning capabilities of Gemini.

🛠️ How we built it

We chose a high-performance stack to handle heavy data processing:

  • Backend: Built with Django (Python) to manage repository cloning and complex data parsing.
  • AI Logic: Integrated Google Gemini 2.5 Flash for its massive 2-million-token context window and rapid processing.
  • Frontend: A sleek, responsive React (TypeScript) dashboard designed for a "stealth-tech" cinematic feel.
  • Secret Sauce: We built a custom "Smart Content Filtering" engine that strips away "documentation noise" (badges, license text, assets), reducing token usage by over 60% before it hits the AI.

🚧 Challenges we ran into

The biggest hurdle was API Quota Management and JSON Parsing. Gemini often returns conversational text or Markdown-wrapped JSON that standard parsers can't read. We overcame this by implementing a robust Regex-based extraction layer and a Backoff-Retry strategy to handle the Free Tier rate limits without crashing the user experience.

🏆 Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Zero-Lag Visualization: Generating complex Mermaid.js diagrams from raw code structure in under 10 seconds.
  • Token Efficiency: Successfully analyzing large repositories (like 50+ file projects) within the free-tier Gemini limits through our custom optimization engine.
  • Deployability: Achieving a seamless full-stack deployment using Vercel for the frontend and Render for the backend.

📖 What we learned

Building RepoRecon taught us that "Less is More" in AI prompts. We learned how to engineer prompts that force the AI to think like an Architect, not just a chatbot. We also sharpened our skills in DevOps, specifically in managing stateless backend environments and handling cross-origin (CORS) security between Vercel and Render.

🚀 What's next for RepoRecon

  • Multimodal UI Audits: Allowing Gemini to "look" at screenshots of the app to compare the actual design against the code.
  • Direct PR Integration: Automatically commenting architectural diagrams on new GitHub Pull Requests to help reviewers.
  • Private Repo Support: Implementing secure OAuth for private repository analysis while maintaining strict data privacy.
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