What if the colloquial expression “I’m cooked” could evolve from a vague feeling into a measurable metric? Enter Singe: the AI-powered app featuring competitive leaderboards that turns “cookedness” into a quantifiable, shareable score.

Singe started off as what its creator, University of Waterloo management engineering student Neiloy Chaudhuri, describes as a mix of “procrastination and pattern recognition.” After seeing countless students post about being “cooked” for exams, Chaudhuri noticed a shared emotional experience that hadn’t been formalized. “Everyone was feeling it together but nobody was actually tracking it,” he said. “I wanted to turn that into something you could quantify and share.”

By the end of launch day, 227 scores had been generated. Chaudhuri described how the cultural weight of the term “cooked” backed his project, “When your score tells you you’re 87% cooked, you screenshot it because it’s funny and painfully relatable. That shareability was core to the concept from day one.”

Throughout the process, Chaudhuri had to figure out how to make the roast sting with specificity, rather than resorting to generic jabs. He also had to quickly implement nickname restrictions after users started submitting slurs in their nicknames on the leaderboard.

Singe would eventually come up in a product manager interview, landing Chaudhuri the job. “[The interviewer] got roasted, saw their score, and got the full product loop without me narrating it. I could point to real metrics, talk through the design decisions, and give them something genuinely fun to do in the middle of a busy day.”

For those in the early stages of their career, Chaudhuri emphasized the importance of side projects over resumes. “A resume tells someone what you’ve done in the past. A shipped product shows how you think and whether you can actually execute,” he said. He encourages students to abandon perfectionism and “ship the ugly version,” emphasizing that real feedback only comes once people start using a product.

He is already applying those lessons to his next project, Notchwatch, an ambient AI activity monitor designed to run in a MacBook’s notch and display real-time updates on active AI agents. Like Singe, it focuses on identifying a small but real friction point and solving it in a simple, intuitive way.

Singe’s journey from a playful side project to a professional asset leaves no doubt: someone cooked here.

Click here to get singed!

With files from Emma Danesh.