Three college juniors with zero programming experience just launched an app that breaks down congressional voting records and campaign finance data. Politik, which hit the App Store on Thursday, lets users enter their ZIP code and instantly see how their elected representatives vote and where they get their money.
James VandeHei Jr., a rising senior and Division I soccer player at High Point University, built the app alongside Charlie Stallmer from Holy Cross and Chris Brophy from the University of Denver. All three are international relations majors who spent a summer on Capitol Hill and came away frustrated. The data was technically public but practically inaccessible. Congress.gov exists, but deciphering a single bill requires wading through legislative language that might as well be in code.
The three decided to fix that. They had no background in software development, so they taught themselves using artificial intelligence tools. They learned motion graphics, animations, and app prototyping on the fly. The actual software was built by Nate Laquis, a self-taught programmer and finance major who built the full application in under three months without formal computer science training. Laquis has since started his own software agency, Kanopy Labs.
Politik works as a straightforward civic tool. Users provide their location and can see their representatives' voting patterns, campaign funding sources, and answers to questions about legislative procedure. The app lets people track how they would have voted on major bills. It's designed as nonpartisan and data-driven, built to make government records intelligible to anyone.
The success points to a broader shift in what's possible without traditional technical training. VandeHei shared his approach: pick something you care about, then use AI to explore it. He found that learning the AI tools often taught him more about artificial intelligence than about the specific topic he was pursuing. The key, he said, was treating context as a critical asset. His team created detailed skill and memory files for their AI models to reference, turning tasks that once took hours into 20-minute jobs.
The lesson extended to prompt writing itself. VandeHei emphasized that the quality of what you ask an AI model matters enormously. The more time spent crafting precise instructions, the better the results. Glossing over details or rushing the prompts leads to poor outputs down the line.
VandeHei framed Politik as an unfinished project. The goal is building a community of people committed to understanding their government. The three founders are inviting feedback from users and describing the app as an open canvas waiting to be completed by the people who use it.
Author James Rodriguez: "Three kids with no coding skill delivering a tool Congress itself should have built years ago, that's the kind of disruption that makes you rethink what's actually possible in 2025."
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