Kindling

Find a project worth building.

Kindling asks a handful of questions — each one shaped by the answers before it — and hands back project ideas built around what you're into, what you can already do, and how much time you actually have. It never shows you the same idea twice, and you don't need an account to use any of it.

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What makes it different

The questions are generated, not scripted. There is no fixed list of screens. nextQuestion() reads everything you've said so far and builds the next question from it. Pick Food & cooking and the follow-up asks about weeknight cooking and food waste. Pick Tools for developers and it asks about debugging and code review. Say you have no skills and the whole path changes shape.

"I have no idea" is a real path, not a dead end. It walks down a ladder of fallbacks, and every rung has an escape hatch:

What are you into?          → none of these
  What can you do?          → I don't have any skills yet
    What annoys you?        → none of these either
      Two gut-feel cards    ← the floor; this always produces a signal

Ideas never repeat. Every idea is a combination of five slots — domain, focus, audience, mechanic, twist — hashed into a fingerprint. Fingerprints you've been shown are recorded and excluded from every future draw. The reachable space runs to hundreds of thousands of combinations, and the app tells you how many are left for your current answers.

Try everything before signing up. Questions, generation and saving all work with no account. Make one later and everything you did as a guest is pushed to the server and folded in — saved ideas and the record of what you've already seen — so nothing is lost and nothing is re-shown.

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The backend

api/ is a Cloudflare Worker over a D1 database. Saved ideas and seen fingerprints live in SQL on the server, not in the browser.

Accounts have no email and no password. The server mints a 160-bit recovery code, stores only its SHA-256 hash, and that code is the bearer token. A dump of the database cannot be used to sign in as anyone. The code is the recovery story and the way onto a second device: paste it anywhere and your library follows.

The client keeps the token in localStorage — the key, not the data.

Route
POST /v1/accounts	Mint an account. Returns the only copy of the code.
GET /v1/state	Everything this account owns.
POST /v1/sync	Merge the client's state in, return the union. Also the guest→account migration.
DELETE /v1/saved/:id	Remove one saved idea.

The API never reads an account id from a request. Identity is derived from the bearer token server-side and every query is scoped to it.

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Running it

npm install
npm run dev

Open http://localhost:3000. That's it — no environment variables, no backend needed for the site to work.

Turning on accounts

cd api
npm install
npx wrangler login                  # one-time
npm run db:create                   # copy the id into wrangler.toml
npm run db:migrate
npm run deploy

Then put the Worker URL in .env.local:

NEXT_PUBLIC_KINDLING_API=https://kindling-api.<your-subdomain>.workers.dev

Add the same value as a repository variable named NEXT_PUBLIC_KINDLING_API to switch accounts on for the deployed site, and add that origin to ALLOWED_ORIGINS in api/wrangler.toml.

Tests

npm run smoke        # question ladders + the never-repeat guarantee
npm run smoke:api    # API contract, against `cd api && npm run dev`

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Deploying

Pushing to main builds a static export and publishes it to GitHub Pages via .github/workflows/deploy.yml. Enable Settings → Pages → Source: GitHub Actions once. The Worker deploys separately with wrangler deploy.

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Layout

src/
  app/                  Landing (which is the first question), flow, results, library
  components/
    choice-grid.tsx     The option-card picker the whole flow is built on
    flow.tsx            Renders whatever question the engine hands it
    idea-card.tsx       One idea, with its first three steps
  lib/
    engine/
      taxonomy.ts       Domains, focuses, audiences, mechanics, twists — the raw material
      questions.ts      Builds the next question from the profile so far
      generate.ts       Samples the slot space, excluding everything already seen
    store.tsx           Local cache, and the guest → account merge
    api.ts              Client for the Worker; inert when unconfigured
api/
  src/index.ts          The Worker: CORS, token auth, sync, delete
  schema.sql            accounts, saved_ideas, seen_ideas
  wrangler.toml         D1 binding and the CORS allowlist
brand/
  icon.svg              Source for every raster icon
  build-icons.mjs       node brand/build-icons.mjs
scripts/
  smoke.mts             Engine guarantees
  api-smoke.mts         API contract

Built with Next.js, TypeScript and shadcn/ui.