SurviveAI

I've spent significant time in the wilderness and in regions of the world with zero cellular connectivity. Sometimes you have questions out there — about health, cooking, plant identification, basic survival — that would be genuinely helpful to answer in the moment. With everything these LLMs have compressed into their weights, it felt obvious that you should be able to access that knowledge without needing a cell tower. So I built a survival assistant that runs entirely on-device, using edge computing, with no connectivity required.

A React Native app running Qwen 1.7B on-device with tool calling to a local knowledge base, speech-to-text for hands-free interaction, and vision input so you can point your camera at something and ask about it. The entire system works offline — no cloud, no API calls, no signal needed. It's a full agentic loop running on your phone.

I think this points to where the world is heading. As small language models become more powerful, there's a growing case for keeping compute on-device — for privacy, for cost efficiency, and for reliability. If you architect these systems well with agentic tool calling, they can be surprisingly capable even at small parameter counts. Beyond the wilderness use case, there's a broader infrastructure argument: systems that depend entirely on cloud connectivity are a single point of failure. If systems go down, you lose functionality. On-device LLMs can unlock local capabilities that traditionally required the cloud, and that resilience matters — whether you're in the backcountry or just dealing with unreliable infrastructure.

Building SurviveAI taught me a lot about the current capabilities and limitations of smaller parameter models, how to construct effective agentic tool-calling patterns at the edge, and how to design UX for high-stress situations where simplicity is everything. It was also just a fun end-to-end product using a mobile-centric stack that was different from my usual web work — and a nice full-circle connection to those 40 days in Alaska where I had nothing but a topographical map and my own judgment.