AirNEET: Building an Airplane Mode Socratic Mentor for My Sister's NEET Prep (100% Offline RAG)

Syed Saqib — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 06:18:37 +0000

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend

What I Built

Preparing for the Indian National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) requires memorizing thousands of verbatim lines across the NCERT curriculum. My sister, Sifat, is preparing for NEET Medical 2027.

Whenever she studied complex Biology chapters, she ran into three major roadblocks:

The Distraction Loop: Opening a browser or study app on her laptop invited notifications, WhatsApp pings, and YouTube rabbit holes. When she switched to Airplane Mode to focus, traditional digital study tools stopped working.
The Spoon-Feeding Trap: General conversational LLMs immediately provide full answers. Without the cognitive strain of recalling facts from memory, retention collapses on exam day.
Negative Marking & Hallucinations: NEET penalizes incorrect answers with negative marks (-1 mark per incorrect answer). A general LLM hallucinating a single biochemical bond or enzyme property can damage an aspirant's score.

I built AirNEET specifically for Sifat: an offline desktop web tutor built exclusively for Airplane Mode. It features:

100% Offline Local RAG: Grounded strictly in NCERT textbook excerpts without requiring internet connectivity.
Strict Socratic Tutoring: Never gives the answer directly; provides one conceptual clue and one diagnostic test question to force active recall.
"Roast My Mistakes" Mode: A supportive sibling persona that analyzes session mistakes with lighthearted banter and high-yield NEET mnemonics.
Asynchronous Mentor Sync: Once Wi-Fi is restored after her study block, session metrics and identified weak topics sync to a cloud dashboard so I can review her progress.

Demo

Live Sibling Review Dashboard (Render): https://airneet.onrender.com/dashboard
Offline Client: Runs locally on http://localhost:3000 under complete Airplane Mode.

Code

syed-yaga / AirNEET

AirNEET (Offline Socratic RAG)

Hacktoberfest 2026 • Challenge 1: Build for a Friend
Mentee: Sifat (NEET Medical Aspirant)
Core AI: Local Ollama (llama3.2 + nomic-embed-text)
Stack: Next.js 14/15 (App Router), Tailwind CSS, TypeScript, Express (Render-ready)

Executive Summary & Problem Definition

Preparing for the Indian National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) requires memorizing thousands of NCERT lines across Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. However, modern studying faces three critical friction points:

The Distraction Loop: Studying online invites social media notifications, messaging apps, and video rabbit holes. Turning Wi-Fi off eliminates distractions but breaks standard web learning tools.
The Spoon-Feeding Trap: Standard conversational LLMs output full answers directly. When a student doesn't have to retrieve the information from memory, active recall drops drastically.
Hallucination Risk: Generative AI often hallucinates facts, which is fatal in NEET's strict negative-marking scheme (-1 mark per incorrect answer).

The Solution:

AirNEET is a 100% offline desktop…

View on GitHub

GitHub Repository: https://github.com/syed-yaga/AirNEET
License: MIT License

How I Built It

AirNEET balances an offline-first local client with an asynchronous cloud review companion:

1. Local Open-Source AI Stack (Ollama)

LLM Engine: Local llama3.2 running locally on localhost:11434 for sub-second, zero-cost Socratic streaming.
Embedding Model: Local nomic-embed-text (~274 MB) generating embeddings completely offline.
Vector Store: In-memory LangChain vector store serialized to client/data/vector_store/index.json.

2. Frontend & RAG Pipeline

Framework: Next.js 14/15 App Router, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS.
Selective Ingestion: Chunked Class 11 Chapter 9 (Biomolecules) into 47 optimized chunks (500 tokens, 80 overlap), keeping the active memory footprint under 2 GB RAM.
Socratic Guardrail: Enforces responses formatted with strict ### Conceptual Clue: and ### Diagnostic Question: headers alongside verified NCERT page citations.
Local Persistence: Writes study session logs and weak areas to ./data/study_log.json with zero network dependency.

3. Cloud Review Backend (Render)

Backend: Express & TypeScript web service deployed on Render.
Sync Mechanism: When Wi-Fi is toggled back on, clicking "Sync to Brother" dispatches the session payload to POST https://airneet.onrender.com/api/sync.
Mentor Dashboard: Accessible at GET /dashboard, rendering an overview of Sifat's study sessions, questions asked, and flagged weak concepts.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

Open-source and local AI were non-negotiable for this project:

True Airplane Mode: Proprietary cloud APIs (OpenAI, Claude) require an active internet connection, directly breaking the core goal of a distraction-free, isolated study environment.
Deterministic Grounding & Zero Cost: High-school students should not face subscription paywalls, token limits, or cloud downtime during exam preparation. Open-weight models like llama3.2 and nomic-embed-text provide reliable, sub-second inference at zero cost.
Data Sovereignty: Study logs, mistake patterns, and personal learning pace remain entirely on the local device.

Prize Categories

Primary Track: Hacktoberfest Challenge 1 — Build for a Friend (Built for my sister, Sifat, for NEET 2027)
Partner Category: Render (Express review dashboard and sync API web service deployed on Render)

DEV Community: Syed Saqib