// the find
noodle-run/noodle
Rethinking Student Productivity
Noodle is a student productivity app built with Next.js 13, tRPC, Drizzle ORM, and Turso/SQLite. It aims to consolidate note-taking, flashcards, task management, and grade tracking into one platform. Despite 12k stars, it's very early-stage — the dashboard preview shown in the README is a UI mockup, not working software.
- Solid modern stack choices: tRPC for end-to-end type safety, Drizzle ORM with Turso (libSQL) is a reasonable lightweight DB setup for a SaaS, and Upstash Redis for rate limiting/caching makes sense at this scale.
- Project scaffolding and DX tooling is properly set up — Husky hooks, ESLint flat config, Prettier, Changesets for versioning, and separate CI workflows for PRs vs main branch show someone thought about contributor experience.
- Component architecture using a custom primitives layer over Radix UI is cleaner than dumping shadcn directly into pages, making future design consistency easier to maintain.
- The schema is minimal and focused right now (modules, early-access), which is appropriate for pre-MVP — no over-engineering of data models before the product direction is clear.
- The gap between the 12k stars and actual functionality is enormous. The core promised features — note-taking and flashcards — have zero implementation in the codebase. What exists is basically a marketing site with auth and a modules list.
- Last meaningful push was October 2024 and development momentum looks shaky — the README's 'resurrection' blog post suggests the project has already gone dormant once. Stars were likely driven by a viral moment, not sustained delivery.
- No tests whatsoever. The CI pipeline runs lint and type checks only. For a product handling student data under AGPL, there's no safety net for regressions.
- Clerk is used for auth but the dependency isn't obviously abstracted, so swapping it out later (Clerk pricing at scale is a real concern) would require changes throughout the codebase rather than in one adapter layer.