claws
Team consisting of an NYU CS MS and JPMC software engineer alongside a Stevens ML MS engineer specializing in LLM quantization, RAG, and full-stack development.
YouTube Video
Project Description
Project Overview: Vichar - https://ai-vichar.vercel.app
Vichar is an AI-native research workbench that transforms how humans interact with complex knowledge. Instead of relying on a static chat window, Vichar features a dynamic, self-organizing canvas. When a user drops documents into the workspace, the interface physically awakens, restructuring itself in real-time based purely on the AI’s understanding of the content.
The Innovation: Shattering UI Conventions
We shattered the standard “query-and-wait” chatbot paradigm by treating the interface itself as the primary innovation. By directly hooking into Claude’s advanced reasoning and entity-extraction capabilities, the UI becomes a live manifestation of the model’s thought process.
Rather than forcing the user to dig through text logs or manually build out charts, Claude evaluates the research context and autonomously triggers the exact visualization needed for the moment. It is a playful, anticipatory, and deeply responsive generative experience where the AI plays the UI like an instrument, going far beyond conventional sliders and menus.
Prototype Stability
We achieved rock-solid prototype stability by utilizing “Controlled Generative UI” via the AG-UI protocol [CopilotKit Docs]. Instead of asking the LLM to write slow, error-prone React code at runtime, Claude is given a strict registry of highly optimized, pre-built frontend tools. When Claude’s reasoning dictates a layout change, it simply passes structured JSON parameters to these tools, which instantly and reliably mount the correct components without hallucinated syntax or layout breaks.
Technologies & Frameworks
Next.js (App Router): The core full-stack React framework.
CopilotKit: The generative UI engine powering the agent-to-UI communication, tool execution, and state synchronization.
Claude API: The underlying intelligence driving layout decisions, content chunking, and the live “thinking stream.”
Shadcn UI & Tailwind CSS: Providing the accessible, beautiful base components (Cards, Timelines, Charts) that serve as Claude’s rendering tools.
Upstash Redis & Vector: Handling high-speed session caching, state management, and semantic document embeddings.
Bun & Zed: The ultra-fast JavaScript toolkit and editor combo used to rapidly scaffold, build, and ship the application under the hackathon time constraints.
Prior Work
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