Building an Offline-First Bushfire Response Platform With Hermes Agent

This is a submission for the Hermes Agent Challenge: Build With Hermes Agent

What I Built

Project Haven is an AI-powered emergency response platform for bushfire preparedness — evacuation routing, tiered real-time alerts, government recovery grant discovery, and offline-first PWA support for when mobile networks go down mid-crisis.

The platform was originally a 46-hour hackathon build (GovHack 2024 — we won). This year I brought it back from the dead and rebuilt it properly: event-driven microservices, contract-first OpenAPI specs, a prediction engine based on XGBoost weights from our historical bushfire notebooks, and a fully offline-capable React PWA.

The one piece that was always a hollow mock was the AI Assistant — the in-app emergency guidance chat. It had a setTimeout pretending to think and a big switch statement of canned responses. Every time I looked at it I felt embarrassed.