The 4 a.m. call from the ER
DistinctiveAnchor · That one shift when your dad was on-call and you sat by the phone.
Shape · single moment
§ Suite · Services
What Illuma actually does.
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5 directions · anchored to your material
Ranked by distinctiveness
Rebuilding grandma's cassette player
DistinctiveAnchor · The Sony from your Suzhou trip · summer after 10th.
Shape · object → identity
Why physics stopped being intimidating
SolidAnchor · The AP Physics C moment when circuits finally clicked.
Shape · intellectual arc
Teaching your brother to lose gracefully
Crowded territoryAnchor · Chess ladder at your local club, 2nd-grade cousin.
Shape · relationship arc
The debate you lost that you're still thinking about
SolidAnchor · Regionals semi, spring of 11th grade.
Shape · single moment
Output includes
- Candidate directions, each with a specific anchor
- Ranked by surprise and distinctiveness
- Crowded-territory warning
- Common App and supplements both supported
Under the hood
ML models + calibration layers, not a ChatGPT wrapper.
Anchor retrieval from your real material
Directions must point to a specific moment, object, or scene from your profile.
Peer-essay quality gate across the decision corpus
Reference essays are filtered to strong or exceptional reviews only.
Structural-shape vocabulary (12 forms)
Outputs are diversified across structural types so you see variety, not five variants of the same shape.
Crowded-territory detection
Topics that recur frequently in the peer corpus are flagged so you can choose the risk consciously.
Supplement-aware shape
Different prompt types get different scaffolding so a why-school direction doesn't look like an identity direction.