The developers, students at UC Berkeley, created an app called Origin that aims to address the problem of cluttered browser tabs by organizing browsing history into context-aware workspaces with automatically generated summaries and semantic search capabilities. They used LangChain as a tool for summarization and chatbot functionality, utilizing OpenAI embeddings and vectorstores to efficiently process large amounts of text data. The project was developed over 36 hours at Stanford's TreeHacks hackathon and is intended to provide a baseline level of value before adding more advanced features.