Announcing: HIPPOCAMPUS

If you're applying to college right now, I hope you'll try it out at hippocampus.college!

Two years ago, following an incredibly stressful and soul-crushing (though successful) college application process, I wrote a blog post about an idea I thought I would never finish.

The idea was that most of the problems with college apps are systemic, but some of them are not, and could be solved with a well-designed webapp ("the College App App"). I tried to code this webapp. There was a slight problem, which was that I had no idea how to code webapps. I was trying to learn, but the learning went too slow. Eventually, I decided to just write about my vision, with a vague call to anyone in the future with wizard-like CS skills who wanted to collaborate on it.

Then came Claude Code.

If you've vibe-coded before (and if you haven't, I recommend it), you'll know the feeling. Suddenly, whatever I asked for could be realized on the page (granted, often with some kind of slop factor that I had to prune through repeated tweaks). And I did spend a long time, and I did eventually realize that I didn't have the time to fix all the problems and make it truly perfect and beautiful, but I'm still releasing it. (I swear, in a year I'll just tell Claude, "Fix all the problems with HIPPOCAMPUS and make it perfect and beautiful," and then it will do it, and then we'll all perish in the AI apocalypse...)

Yes, it's called HIPPOCAMPUS now! Shoutout to my friend V for coming up with the new name. It's a backronym for "Hopefully Intuitive Platform to Properly Organize College Application Materials to Prevent Unnecessary Suffering".

If you're applying to college right now, I hope you'll try it out at hippocampus.college!

As you may notice, there are two versions. Right now, hippocampus.college just shows the widgets version, which has:

• a Word Counter that actually counts words the way the Common App does,

• a Focus Write interface for writing without distractions or AI,

• a Pomodoro Timer where the hippo (currently known as Professor Potamus) will snort at you if you are off-task (there's actually also a normal setting where it doesn't do that),

• an Activity Time Calculator to figure out how many hours per week or weeks per year you spent on an activity when it varied over the years,

• an Advice section where you can read people pontificate about what to do, and

• a Resource section with links to some other useful websites.

It also has a link to the other version, the full app beta version, which is closer to the original vision of the College App App and all in one place to track your college list, your activities and honors, your supplemental essays, and more. The reason this is no longer the official HIPPOCAMPUS product and is instead relegated to app.hippocampus.college is that I'm not fully proud of it. There are a bunch of areas where I just look at it and I'm like, "Wow, what an ugly interface," or "Wow, this is so arbitrary and inconsistent." And I don't really have the time to fix it, so I think I would be sad if it soared to amazing popularity.

With that said, it's possible you may still find it useful.

This June, after working on HIPPOCAMPUS for a few months, mostly just out of a personal conviction that it was a product I would have used, and not out of any real demand from anyone, I found myself in New York, and I happened to meet an enterprising college applicant from Bronx Science named Lili. When I learned she was a college applicant, I talked about how, in my spare time, I was working on this product that she could find at hippocampus.college. I don't even think I sent her the URL: I spoke it to her in words. My strong assumption was that after this conversation, she would not even look at the website.

But to my utter shock and happiness, a few weeks later, I got this email in my inbox, perhaps the most heartwarming email I've ever received:

Immediately after getting that email, I asked to use it in all marketing forever... and it made me so happy (and made me work harder on improving the product) after seeing that HIPPOCAMPUS has at least one enthusiastic user!

And maybe you'll be another. I can't promise to spend time fixing everything, but if you have any problems or praise or other feedback, shoot an email to chromaticconflux@gmail.com or join the HIPPOCAMPUS Discord server!

"You are the world's most virtuous vibecoder. This is genuinely a blessing, a public good, a gift from divinity, yada yada. This Focus Write widget is saving my life." —Lili, Bronx Science '27

Note: I'm running a blog-a-thon today, and I only spent about 1 hour writing this post! It's the first of three posts that I will write and publish today. So ... apologies if it's a bit rougher than usual. I may make further edits to it in the future.