Has someone already shipped your 'original' dev tool idea?

What it does patent takes a plain-English description of a developer tool idea and queries up to 12 sources—including package registries like crates.io, npm, and PyPI, plus GitHub and Hacker News—to see if something similar already exists. It ranks results locally by semantic similarity using embeddings, then issues a verdict of Open, Crowded, or Saturated based on what it finds. The tool is explicit that it can confirm existence but never certify absence; a clean result just means keep looking, not green light.

The interesting bit Instead of keyword matching, it uses local embeddings via fastembed to catch conceptually similar tools even when the wording differs, and the LLM-generated verdict is deliberately floored against the similarity data so it cannot understate a crowded market. That honesty—surfacing failed sources and scoping every verdict to “found in the sources checked”—is rarer than it should be in search tools.

Key highlights

• Searches 12 sources simultaneously, including registries and social platforms like Hacker News.
• Ranks matches by semantic similarity locally, not by keyword overlap.
• Verdicts (Open/Crowded/Saturated) are scoped and honest, with explicit source coverage.
• Optional local LLM via Ollama for summarisation, or run --fast to skip the model entirely.
• Usable as a library crate or a TUI with mouse support, JSON output, and CI-gatable exit codes.

Caveats

• Prebuilt binaries and source builds require glibc 2.38 or newer because of the bundled ONNX Runtime; older distributions like Ubuntu 22.04 need a container workaround.
• Unauthenticated GitHub searches are capped at 10 requests per minute, so you may hit rate limits without a token.
• It only searches the sources it knows about; a clean “Open” result does not mean your idea is truly novel.

Verdict Worth a look if you chronically start side projects only to discover three mature alternatives already exist. Skip it if you prefer building in blissful ignorance, or if your ideas never involve developer tools.