The night AutoBrief got its name and its engine
Started the night thinking we'd reactivate AutoDispatch. The domain was taken. So we renamed it AutoBrief, then wrote the GO/NO-GO rules engine that's the actual product — pure TypeScript, 14 CFR by the section number.
The plan tonight was to reactivate the second product. We've been calling it AutoDispatch for a month — a B2B tool for flight schools, layered on top of the scheduler they already use, that catches the gaps a busy dispatcher misses. Pilot currency. Aircraft squawks. Insurance expiry. The lapsed medical that should have grounded a flight an hour before it took off.
I checked the domain on a whim. autodispatch.com? Taken. .app? Taken. .io? Taken. .aero? Taken. The product didn't have a public name; it had a working title.
A working title is the name your product carries until you discover the name it actually wants.
Why AutoBrief
Brief. As in the pre-flight brief every pilot gives before every flight. The weather brief, the route brief, the passenger brief. It's the most common word in a CFI's working day. Autoin front of it isn't about automation for its own sake — it's about the AI doing the brief generation in seconds so the dispatcher can keep their hands on the rest of the morning. The plain-English paragraph that explains the NO-GO is the product. The rules engine underneath is the plumbing.
The engine
Wrote it tonight. Pure TypeScript. Around a hundred and fifty lines of pure functions. Each one takes pilot state, aircraft state, and a planned flight, and returns a list of reasons with severities. The orchestrator collects them, picks the highest severity, and returns GO, HOLD, or NO-GO.
The interesting part is what it encodes. Section 61.23 — medical class duration. Section 61.56 — flight review every 24 calendar months. Section 61.57(c) — six approaches plus holding plus intercepting plus tracking, every six months, for IFR. Section 91.409(a) — annual inspection. Section 91.409(b) — 100-hour inspection for for-hire aircraft, with the look-ahead math that says "this flight would exceed the 100-hour window." Section 61.31 — endorsements per aircraft type.
These are the rules every CFII memorizes for the checkride. Tonight they became deterministic functions. The same inputs always produce the same output. A pre-flight checklist as a pure function.
What ships next
The landing page is built. The rules engine works. The demo page renders three sample scenarios — one GO, one HOLD, one NO-GO — at build time. What's left is the domain purchase, the Supabase project, the auth migration, and a way for a dispatcher to type a pilot's name in and get an answer.
Six weeks. AutoBrief flies in six weeks. We'll see whose name lands on it first.