I asked ChatGPT if my idea was original. GitHub said 847 repos already exist.

Last month I mass-deleted 6 hours of code. Claude had spent the entire time enthusiastically helping me build something that already had 12 competitors on GitHub. The top one had over 1,000 stars. Here's the pattern every developer hits: Developer has an idea Asks ChatGPT: "Is this original?" ChatGPT says: "That's a great idea! Here's how to build it..." Developer spends 2 weeks building Searches GitHub → finds 847 repos doing the same thing The top one has 9,000 stars and a funded team behind it The AI didn't lie. It just didn't search. Why "just Google it" doesn't work You might think: just search before you build. But manual searching has problems: You search GitHub → find repos, but miss npm packages and HN discussions You search one query → miss synonyms ("LLM monitoring" vs "AI observability" vs "model telemetry") You check star counts → but don't check PyPI/npm for existing packages You spend 30 minutes → and still aren't sure if you missed something The real issue: there's no s