Why my Android AI app shows its plan before it does anything

I've been building Kryzz AI on weekends and evenings for a few months. It's an open-source Android app for chatting with AI models, talking to them by voice, and letting an agent do small multi-step jobs. It's MIT-licensed and the code is on GitHub.

This post is about one design choice that ended up shaping most of the app: the agent has to show you what it's going to do while it does it.

The problem with "magic" agents on a phone

When I tried agent features in other apps, the thing that bothered me most wasn't bad answers. It was not knowing what happened. Did it actually open that page? Did it make up the source? Did it just spend a dollar of my API credit on a loop?

On a phone that feels worse, because you're usually half paying attention. So I wanted the agent to be boring and visible instead of clever and hidden.

What that looks like in v1.1.2

• A live plan card. When you ask for something in Agent Auto, it writes a short plan first and ticks steps off as it goes. If the plan looks wrong you can stop it early.
• A work log. Every search, page read and file it touches shows up as a small chip, so you can check where an answer came from.
• Only allowed links get fetched. Page reads go through a filter instead of following whatever URL the model invents.
• Review before send. Longer answers get a second pass before they're shown to you.
• A cost cap. Default is $0.25 per task, adjustable up to $2, so a runaway loop can't drain your key.
• Fast / Balanced / Max. One chip to trade speed for quality.
• Real files at the end. It can hand back a DOCX, XLSX or PDF instead of a wall of text.

Local-first

Chats stay on the device. You bring your own API key for whichever provider you use, and there's no telemetry. I can't promise "nothing ever leaves the phone" because the model call itself goes to your provider, but nothing goes to me.

Stack

Kotlin and Jetpack Compose. The file outputs share one Markdown model that gets rendered into DOCX, XLSX or PDF, which kept the export code a lot smaller than I expected.

Try it

It's still early. The release is a debug APK, so expect rough edges.

• Repo: https://github.com/kriddss3/kryzz-ai
• v1.1.2 release (APK): https://github.com/kriddss3/kryzz-ai/releases/tag/v1.1.2

Short demo:

If you've built agent features yourself, I'd like to hear how you handle the "what is it doing right now" problem. Issues and PRs on GitHub are welcome.