patent: find out if your CLI idea already exists (2026)

You spend a weekend building a tool to kill whatever process is sitting on a port. You polish it, write a README, push to GitHub — and then someone drops a comment: "Have you seen fkill? Or kill-port? There's also portk, cross-port-killer..." Ten tools doing the same thing. You just didn't know.

patent is a Rust CLI/TUI released June 2 by Riad Mukhtarov (r14dd) that runs this prior-art check for you before you start. You describe your idea in plain English, and it concurrently searches 11 package registries — crates.io, npm, PyPI, GitHub, Go, Maven, NuGet, RubyGems, Docker Hub, VS Code Marketplace, and Hacker News — then ranks results by semantic similarity and returns a verdict: Open, Crowded, or Saturated. 1 2

github.com · GitHub repository

r14dd/patent

https://github.com/r14dd/patent

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How it works

Type a description of your idea and patent parses it for platform signals: mention "rust" and it weights crates.io; mention "docker" and it targets Docker Hub. GitHub and Hacker News are always included as language-agnostic baselines. 1

The ranking uses AllMiniLM-L6-V2 (a 80 MB local embedding model, downloaded on first run and cached at ~/.cache/patent on Linux or ~/Library/Caches/patent on macOS). Cosine similarity scores each match; results land in an interactive TUI where you scroll, filter, and open any entry directly. 1

Ollama is optional. --fast mode skips LLM inference entirely, working from cosine similarity scores alone — so the tool runs offline and without any model setup beyond the initial embedding download. If Ollama isn't installed or a model isn't pulled, --fast activates automatically as a graceful fallback. 1

The verdict has a built-in caveat the author calls "the integrity rule": patent can prove something exists, but can't prove something doesn't exist. Any registry it couldn't reach is marked not reached, not clear. 1

Install and try it

Requires: Rust stable 1.80+ (the only available distribution channel is crates.io for now — no Homebrew, no apt). 1 3

cargo install patent

On first run, patent downloads ~80 MB of embedding model weights — one time, then cached globally. Set GITHUB_TOKEN to lift the GitHub Search API rate limit from 10 to 30 requests/minute.

A real scenario, same as the demo: you're considering building an interactive CLI to kill processes on a port. Before writing a line:

patent "interactive cli to kill whatever is on a port"

In the demo below, this query returns 36 matches across npm and crates.io and renders a Saturated verdict with a similarity-ranked table. The top hit, kill-port on npm (score 0.77), is the exact thing you were about to build. 2

patent TUI showing a Saturated verdict for "interactive cli to kill whatever is on a port" — 36 matches ranked by cosine similarity — patent TUI demo: 36 matches, Saturated verdict 2

For scripting and CI checks:

patent "my idea description" --json | jq '.verdict'

Shell completions for bash, zsh, fish, and PowerShell are also available via patent completions <shell>. 1

Community signal

patent hit r/rust on release day with 555 upvotes at 94% positive and 40 comments. For context, the next-nearest CLI tool in this window had 10 GitHub stars and no Reddit thread — patent's Reddit signal was in a different order of magnitude. 4 The dominant thread of comment was a specific one: this is what AI should be used for.

"Neural networks are only really good at finding things, not making things. Good job at using an LLM for something it's actually good at." — duckofdeath87, r/rust 4

"It's an AI tool that actually seems both useful and ethical. That's a rare breed." — stumpychubbins, r/rust 4

One commenter (palapapa0201, 4 upvotes) asked "Is this vibe coded" — a pointed question given the current climate around AI-generated tools. Mukhtarov disclosed upfront in the r/commandline post that the code is partially AI-assisted and the post was drafted with AI help, and the core logic (concurrent search, deduplication, semantic ranking) is deterministic Rust: the tool functions identically with --fast and zero LLM involvement. 5 The project includes GitHub Actions CI, enforced clippy lints, and wiremock integration tests. 2

patent at a glance

As of 2026-06-02, release day

GitHub stars	117
r/rust upvotes	555
Registries searched	11
crates.io downloads	49

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Caveats

cargo only, for now. No Homebrew formula, no pre-built binary. If you don't have a Rust toolchain, this is a ~80 MB model download plus a toolchain install. For Rust users, it's a two-minute setup; for everyone else, the friction is real. 3
v0.1.0, 117 stars, 18 commits. The tool works but the API surface will move. Don't script heavily against the JSON output format until it stabilizes.
No Homebrew/OpenAI API runtime support yet. A r/commandline commenter flagged that Ollama has a poor reputation in some communities and suggested supporting other OpenAI-compatible runtimes. Mukhtarov acknowledged this. 5 The --fast mode makes this a non-issue for most users, but it's a gap.
No HN thread yet. As of publication, patent hasn't surfaced on Hacker News — unusual for something that hit r/rust this hard, but it's less than 13 hours old. Worth watching.
Verdict is a starting point, not a decision. The integrity rule is honest engineering: patent flags what it finds across 11 registries, not what the whole internet contains. A clean result warrants more digging, not a green light.

Try it: cargo install patent

Cover image from r14dd/patent (MIT OR Apache-2.0)

patent: find out if your CLI idea already exists

How it works

Install and try it

Community signal

Caveats

References

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