Startline AI
An AI companion for motorsport event documents: folder of PDFs in — searchable vault, native app, Siri voice answers, and amendment diffs out.
Overview
A full product family built around one idea: turn a folder of event PDFs into something you can actually ask. A vault ingests the documents; a server exposes them through fast full-text search, an MCP server for AI agents, a phone-first web app, and a Siri voice endpoint; a native SwiftUI iOS app puts timelines, documents, and bilingual Q&A in your pocket at the track.
Problem
I marshalled at a Formula 1 event. The official app delivers PDFs — but it can't answer "what time does sign-on close on Saturday?" And when the schedule changes, the amendment is just another PDF that never tells you what actually changed. At a track with poor signal, you need answers, not documents.
Solution
Two kinds of search, layered: instant deterministic full-text search (SQLite FTS5 with event-jargon synonyms — works offline at the track), and agent search through an MCP server exposing nine typed tools so an AI assistant can reason across documents and cite pages. Amendment diffs show what a new version actually changed. The iOS app adds a day timeline that highlights what's next, grounded Q&A in English or Vietnamese, and a native Siri App Intent — "Hey Siri, Ask Startline" works out of the box.
Lessons learned
Deterministic search and AI search aren't competitors — they're layers. The boring index answers 80% of questions instantly and offline; the agent handles the questions that need reasoning across documents. Building for a real event day (bad signal, one-handed use, time pressure) forced better engineering than any abstract spec would have.
Future improvements
More event types beyond motorsport — the pattern of "official PDFs that people need answers from, under time pressure" shows up everywhere from conferences to construction sites.