02 · AI product
AlwaysThere
Founding engineer on a real-time AI support app for Alzheimer's caregivers — from concept to investor-ready MVP in three weeks.
The question was how far you can push an AI product in three weeks. Far enough to put it in front of investors — and to make it feel like a real conversation.
A working MVP in three weeks
I built the app cross-platform in React Native on a PostgreSQL backend, wiring together RAG, multimodal models, and neural text-to-speech over WebSockets. Working directly with the founders, I turned early concepts into live demonstrations they used in investor pitches.
2 seconds to 300 milliseconds
A support assistant only works if it feels immediate. The first version answered in about two seconds, which reads as a machine thinking. Getting that down to 300 milliseconds is what turned the demo from a technology showcase into something that felt like talking to someone.