ForageQuest: A Single-File AI That Tells You Not to Eat the Mushroom

Steven Harianto — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 09:15:00 +0000

I love foraging. I also love not dying. Those two things are in tension when you're holding a mushroom with no signal and no idea if it's a chanterelle or a jack o'lantern.

Every foraging app wanted a server, an API key, and a monthly fee. That's backwards. On a trail, a cloud app is useless exactly when you need it most.

So I built ForageQuest - a gamified foraging companion that runs an open-weight vision model entirely in your browser.

One HTML file. No backend. No API keys. No data leaves your device.

And the part I'm proudest of: it knows when it doesn't know.

Why open matters here

Offline safety. Trails have no signal. CLIP runs on WebGPU in your browser, cached after first load. Zero bars, still works.

Privacy. Your foraging spots are your secret. Photos and GPS never leave your device.

Modifiable safety. Because the model is local, I can tune the confidence threshold and edit the deadly look-alike blocklist in seconds. A closed API can't give me that - and for a tool where failure means poisoning, I need to verify it fails safely.

Free. No API costs. Anyone can run it.

The build

AI: Transformers.js v3 + Xenova/clip-vit-base-patch32. ~150 MB, WebGPU with WASM fallback. Scores your photo against 16 mushroom genera and 14 non-mushroom labels to cut false positives.

The safety gate - the hard part. The app never says "safe to eat." It says "candidate match." Three tiers:

Confidence gate - below 0.70, it refuses to name a species.
Look-alike blocklist - chanterelle → jack o'lantern, morel → false morel, puffball → young amanita.
Never-eat rule - always ends with "consult a local mycologist."

Getting an LLM to say "I don't know" is a product decision, not a model decision. It's the decision that matters most.

Open APIs (keyless, CORS-enabled):

Open-Meteo - rainfall + temp → fruiting likelihood
iNaturalist - nearby observations
GBIF - occurrence count → rarity tier

Gamification: Species Dex (16 to unlock), 8 seasonal quests, streak tracking, field log, and a 10-minute Touch Grass timer that tells you to put the phone away after logging a find.

Taking it outside

[Insert 2–3 photos from your walk here]

Right: Identified a puffball at 82%. Flagged the young-amanita look-alike warning. The Touch Grass timer worked - I put my phone down and found a slime mold I'd have walked past.

Wrong: Confused a chanterelle with a jack o'lantern at 64%. The safety gate caught it and said "Do not eat." A closed API would have returned an answer anyway. Mine returned a warning.

Felt: The screen was the shortest part of the experience. That was the goal.

What I'd change

ElevenLabs for voice safety briefings - hands full of mushrooms, screen off
TabPFN for a real fruiting forecast (currently rule-based)
More species in the CLIP label set

DEV Community: Steven Harianto

ForageQuest: A Single-File AI That Tells You Not to Eat the Mushroom

Why open matters here

The build

Taking it outside

What I'd change

Links