# Debrief is not a PDF chatbot — it recovers decisions with citations

> Source: <https://dev.to/yatharthsharma1309/debrief-is-not-a-pdf-chatbot-it-recovers-decisions-with-citations-5809>
> Published: 2026-09-03 05:13:38+00:00

Teams rarely lose information because they lack documents. They lose it because **decisions, rationale, owners, risks, and dates** are buried across notes, launch plans, and transcripts.

I built **Debrief** for [OpenAI Build Week 2026](https://openai.devpost.com/) to recover those as a structured **Decision Brief**, then let you ask follow-ups that still point at the source.

`demo@debrief.app`

/ `DemoBuildWeek2026!`

(workspace: Launch Planning)A generic “chat with your PDF” answers in paragraphs. Debrief answers in **rows**:

Then you can ask: *What did we decide about pricing and why?* and get a streaming answer with excerpts — not a hallucinated memo.

```
User → React (Vite)
         ↓ REST + SSE
       FastAPI
         ├ JWT auth
         ├ document parse (PDF / DOCX / TXT)
         ├ embeddings → PostgreSQL + pgvector
         ├ Decision Brief (structured extraction)
         └ RAG chat (cited follow-ups)
                    ↓
              OpenRouter (free models)
```

Frontend is on Vercel. API is on Railway. Database is Neon.

**1. Extraction, not summarisation.**

The brief is a schema (decisions, risks, owners). The model fills that schema. A blob of “summary” is a failure.

**2. Citations on every claim.**

If a row cannot point at a chunk, it should not look as confident as one that can.

**3. Stale briefs.**

If the docs change after you saved a brief, the UI tells you to regenerate. Otherwise you trust last week’s launch call.

**4. Isolation.**

Workspaces keep one project’s notes from leaking into another.

That is the product: recover the decision, then verify it against the source.

I am an AI full-stack engineer (React / Next.js / FastAPI / RAG). Portfolio: [yatharthsharma.vercel.app](https://yatharthsharma.vercel.app).