AvyAI

Backcountry avalanche safety, for the people who don't have a forecaster in the group.

Live forecast, weather and snowpack for your zone, reasoned over by Claude, with the education to understand it — on one screen, at 6am, with gloves on. It never tells you whether to go. That's the safety feature.

Why it exists

Most people caught in avalanches are recreational — skiers, boarders, sledders — and most of them had the forecast. The gap isn't access to information. It's holding all of it at once on a cold morning and knowing what it means for the slope in front of you.

AvyAI does the reading. It pulls the live Avalanche Canada forecast, mountain weather and snow-station data for your zone, lays it out on one screen, and lets you ask about it in plain language — answered from the data and from a library of avalanche education, with sources. The aim is simple: a better-informed decision, every time.

It's built for the AST 1-trained day tripper — the course done, a familiar home zone, no professional in the group. It's a non-profit project, and it's free.

The rules it's built on

Every design decision was made by asking one question: how could this get someone hurt?

No verdicts. Ever.An app that says "go" will one day say it on the wrong morning, and someone will trust it. AvyAI never grades your plan, never says "safe." The decision stays yours.

Gaps are as loud as data.A missing number is shown as missing, in its slot, with the reason. The most dangerous screen is a blank read as "nothing to worry about."

Empty is never zero.No snowpack data is "unknown, not zero." No rating is "no rating," never Low.

It never guesses your plan.It doesn't infer your objective, aspect or elevation. If you haven't told it, it says so.

Your observations are never promoted.A whumpf you log is your record — beside the forecast, never merged into it.

It answers in your register.Professional standards were rewritten into plain language before they were allowed in.

Colour means one thing.The danger-scale colours appear on danger ratings and nowhere else — not even the icon.

Collaborate

The code is private by choice, and collaboration is by invitation — the safety design took real care, and the name goes with it. The people the project needs most aren't all engineers:

Avalanche professionals — ACMG guides, AST instructors, forecasters — to cold-review the evaluation scenarios. A few hours; the single highest-leverage thing anyone could do.
Backcountry skiers with an AST 1 — twenty minutes on a call about a morning before a tour.
Educators and writers — material you'd trust a day tripper to read.
iOS / React Native, and retrieval engineers.

Want in? Ask John.