A week before my college's AI Expo, I was demoing my side project — a curated AI tool finder for students called AI Compass.

I picked "Coding" as the goal. The wizard recommended Suno in the top 6.

Suno makes AI music. It has nothing to do with coding.

I checked the data file. Suno's category? "Coding" . So was Power BI. So was Loom. So was Discord, somehow.

The catalog was lying.

The shape of the problem

AI Compass works simply: students answer 4 questions (goal, use case, budget, platform), and the wizard returns 5-6 tools with a one-line reason for each. The catalog had ~450 tools, each tagged into one category from a fixed list (Coding, Writing & Chat, Research, Productivity, Image Gen, Video Gen).

The wizard had a strict hard-gate: pick goal=coding → only tools tagged "Coding" can surface.

The gate worked. The data didn't.

The midnight band-aid

I had hours, not days.…