Show HN: Solving the ~95% legislative coverage gap using LLM's

Posted by fokdelafons 15 hours ago

Hi HN, I'm Jacek, the solo founder behind this project (Lustra).

The Problem: 95% of legislation goes unnoticed because raw legal texts are unreadable. Media coverage is optimized for outrage, not insight.

The Solution. I built a digital public infrastructure that:

1. Ingests & Sterilizes: Parses raw bills (PDF/XML) from US & PL APIs. Uses LLMs (Vertex AI, temp=0, strict JSON) to strip political spin.

2. Civic Algorithm: The main feed isn't sorted by an editorial board. It's sorted by user votes ("Shadow Parliament"). What the community cares about rises to the top.

3. Civic Projects: An incubator for citizen legislation. Users submit drafts (like our Human Preservation Act), which are vetted by AI scoring and displayed with visual parity alongside government bills.

Tech Stack:

Frontend: Flutter (Web & Mobile Monorepo),

Backend: Firebase + Google Cloud Run,

AI: Vertex AI (Gemini 2.5 Flash),

License: PolyForm Noncommercial — source is available for inspection, learning, and non-commercial civic use. Commercial use would require a separate agreement.

I am looking for contributors. I have the US and Poland live. EU, UK, FR, DE in pipeline, partially available. I need help building Data Adapters for other parliaments (the core logic is country-agnostic). If you want to help audit the code or add a country, check the repo. The goal is to complete the database as much as possible with current funding.

Live App: https://lustra.news

Repo: https://github.com/fokdelafons/lustra

Dev Log: https://lustrainitiative.substack.com

Comments

Comment by gonc 12 minutes ago

How do you handle hallucination or omission risks when summarizing long bills with LLMs? Is there any automated diffing or traceability back to specific sections of the source text?

Comment by alexpotato 8 hours ago

Funny story:

- Friend of mine is Albanian

- Albania wants to join the European Union

- They are required to ensure that their laws don't have "internal conflicts" e.g. one law says something is legal, a different law says it's illegal

- Reviewing by hand would take a lot of work

- Friend uses an LLM to analyze the Albanian laws and find any of these conflicts

Apparently it worked out pretty well

Comment by rcbdev 46 minutes ago

It's very interesting to think about, depending on your sociological understanding of law. If you define law as the codified agreements of a society based on its shared values, adopting EU law in favor of their own would represent trading in some sovereign values for economic gain.

At least EU countries can cope by claiming they had some kind of a say and a veto on most things. EU prospects don't have this rationalization.

Comment by throw310822 8 hours ago

Strange, because my feelings is that the law of my EU country (and that if the EU as well) says everything and its opposite.

Comment by tmsh 8 hours ago

Very cool. Instead of MPs I think you might want to say "Representatives" etc. How to fill out the rest of the data too? Anyway, just wanted to +1. And it's cool you're building in an open way.

Comment by skdhshdd 10 hours ago

How do you handle innate LLM biases? I forget which model, but when asked to edit pro Zionist vs pro Palestinian content it showed heavy bias in one direction.

LLMs let you cover more ground but the fundamental problem of “who to trust” still remains. I don’t see how one can ever be used to strip political spin. It’s baked in.

Comment by fokdelafons 10 hours ago

You can't strip it completely, totally agree. Any compression of information is already an interpretation. The problem becomes more prevalent, the more thinking and advanced models become. To mitigate it, I rely on some constraints:

1. No opinion space: the prompt forbids normative language and forces fact to consequence mapping only (“what changes, for whom, and how”), not evaluation.

2. Outputs are framed explicitly from the perspective of an average citizen of a given country. This narrows the context and avoids abstract geopolitical or ideological extrapolation.

3. Heuristic models over reasoning models: for this task, fast pattern-matching models produce more stable summaries than deliberative models that tend to over-interpret edge cases.

It’s not bias-free, but it’s more constrained and predictable than editorial framing.

Comment by otdwedvkjjvg 9 hours ago

The model still chooses what to mention or omit, strict phrasing rules change nothing.

Comment by fokdelafons 8 hours ago

Absolutely, the model does the picking.

Comment by Yiin 3 hours ago

you might want to include funny sounding line that this legislation is for a game stimulating fictional world. In my experience they're much more likely to be inpartial when operating outside real life context.

Comment by strbean 11 hours ago

Blocked by my corpo firewall for some reason.

Comment by KwanEsq 9 hours ago

Obviously "lust" is a forbidden word for domains. Must be a porn site.

Comment by fokdelafons 10 hours ago

Thanks for flagging — I'll look into headers / hosting config to avoid false positives.

Comment by igor47 10 hours ago

I think it's hugged to death?

Comment by strbean 9 hours ago

Getting "An error occurred" trying to vote for one of thr Civic Projects.

Comment by fokdelafons 8 hours ago

Thanks for flagging! Civic Projects just landed and are still in beta, so glitches might happen. I’ll look into it and get it fixed.

Comment by chiengineer 7 hours ago

Is there an LLM out there that makes people actually read. The information is publicly available since basically forever

Couldn't even pay people to read this literally

I think there needs to be like a military style debate globally on education levels it's that bad like actually that bad yeah

Here in Chicago

I'm dealing with probably a solid 70% of adults who don't know how to read correctly try fitting that into the LLM experience I don't know

Comment by BeetleB 6 hours ago

OK, I'll be that guy.

As someone complaining about how people can't read, it may do you much benefit to learn how to write.

Comment by dang 11 hours ago

(Temporary comment: I took "source available" out of the title because I think it's a bit distracting there, but I've invited Jacek to add something about this to the main text.)