What is it?
Compass is a modern, open-source Large Language Model (LLM) client designed to provide a seamless AI chat experience across multiple platforms. Built with React Native and Expo, it offers a rich set of features while maintaining high performance and user experience. The goal is to promote private, decentralized AI - whilst also maintaining access to cloud-based AI through API’s for those who need or prefer it.
How does it work?
The application is a “shell” that stores your conversations, providers and settings. It then connects a backend, which is responsible for the actual AI inference.
The backend can be any of the popular LLM providers, but preferably one that supports running locally such as Ollama or LlamaCpp.
The local models offer a lot of benefits, such as:
- Anonymity
- Diversity of thought
- Customization, ie. you can entirely control the system prompt
- Removal of vendor lock-in
- Using models that have less bias and censorship
I built the app using React Native and Expo, with Nativewind for styling.
This choice was made on two grounds:
- React Native can run efficiently on both iOS and Android, and Expo provides a way to build the app for both platforms using a single codebase.
- Since the app is built with React Native, which uses JavaScript, it can be easily ported to other platforms (such as what I’ve done for Linux using Tauri) and also benefits from the large ecosystem of JavaScript libraries.
My vision for the app
I’m not an AI evangelist, but I do believe that it is becoming very useful for many people and will only continue to do so even more. Given that, I think it’s important for everyone’s sake that it is accessible and that it can be used privately (I might make a blog post about this in the future, but I’ll save it for then.)
So, I ultimately want to make a product that is:
- Private by default
- Decentralised
- Open source
- Multi-platform
- Harnesses the power of AI to make people more productive and happy
I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to achieve towards this goal with Compass, but it’s a good starting point :)
Please do check out the repository and give me some feedback, and maybe a start if you like the project!