Offline, Not Off-Duty: Building an Airgapped Agentic Travel Risk System
It is 11:40pm local time in Crimea. A field researcher — call her T-002 — is in her hotel room when she hears shots outside. She picks up her phone, opens the company travel app, and types what she can see. The app is offline. There is no satellite signal. The ops centre in London cannot be reached.
What happens in the next sixty seconds matters. Not for a sprint retrospective. For her.
This post is about building a system that makes those sixty seconds count — an offline-first agentic travel risk assessment application that runs entirely on a local LLM, asks one clarifying question if it needs to, and produces a structured risk verdict before the connection returns. No cloud dependency. No API key in the critical path. The database, the model, and the application all run on the same MicroK8s node — the one I set up in my previous post on my home lab Intel NUC.
But before the architecture: the context. This system exists because employers have a legal and moral duty to protect people they send into harm's way. That duty does not pause when the internet does.
The code is at JigsawFlux/airgapped-agentic-trm.