From Personal Frustration to #1 on Hacker News: How I Built Off Grid and Hit 425 Stars

The full story of building Off Grid — a FOSS app that runs AI entirely on your phone, offline, with zero data leaving your device. Privacy isn't a feature. It's the whole point. I want to start with a confession. I use AI every single day. For writing, for code, for thinking through problems I'm stuck on. I'm genuinely dependent on it — and for a while, that dependence was quietly eating at me. Every conversation I had with an AI was a conversation I was having on someone else's server . My thoughts, my drafts, my questions, my half-baked ideas — all of it flowing out of my device and into infrastructure I don't control, owned by companies whose terms of service I've definitely never read in full. That bothered me more and more. So I built Off Grid . This is the story of how it went from a personal itch to #1 trending on Hacker News, 150k+ Reddit views, and 425 GitHub stars — and what the journey of actually shipping it looked like, commit by commit. why this? why now? Most people don'