Prior-art
"If there's a bottom to a rabbit hole, it will find the bottom."
Prior-art is short for prior artifact: what someone already made. Before you start something, it finds who did it before, who did it well and who did it badly, and gives you a one-page report. You decide.
What it asks you first
Five short questions, one at a time, so the search aims at your situation and not a generic one: what you are starting and for whom; what kind of camp, where, how big; what you will decide with the answer; who you already know that does this; and how deep to go.
How deep it goes
- Quick, the default: GitHub and the open web.
- Thorough: the above plus review sites, app stores, YouTube walkthroughs, the Wayback Machine, Google Scholar, association sites, grant listings, and your own earlier attempts.
It reads public pages the way a person would. No sign-ins, no accounts, no social media. What sits behind a login is out of scope, and the report says so.
What comes back
Under 400 words: a verdict line ("You can move forward" or "Before you move forward, check these"), the closest match and what it costs, two or three people to talk to and the one question to ask each, the one to copy first and what will probably go wrong, the ones people gave up on, and what the search did not cover.
Get the kit
Subscribe to AI for Camps Weekly with your email and WhatsApp number. The download link and the WhatsApp group invite come with the welcome.
Three files. Free to use and change. One folder serves Claude Code and Codex.