Let's Camp
A social camping trip manager—invite your crew, assign campsites and vehicles, split shared costs, and let an AI assistant handle the logistics.
The spark
I grew up doing a bit of camping, so when our family started going regularly I had a decent idea of what we needed. Friends who joined us didn't have that background, and it was clear how hard it is to get into things like camping, boating, or hunting if you weren't raised around them. Let's Camp started as a packing-list generator to bridge that gap. Now I'm reactivating it as something bigger: a social app for managing group trips end to end—people, campsites, gear, and costs in one place.
What it is
- Group trips with real roles—directors run the trip, counselors help organize, campers RSVP—enforced in the database, not on the honor system.
- Campsite and vehicle assignments so everyone knows where they're sleeping and how they're getting there.
- Shared gear and shopping lists with cost splitting and settle-up links to square up afterward.
- A trip bulletin board with live presence for all the pre-trip chatter.
- An AI assistant that turns "add hot dogs and charcoal for everyone" into a structured plan you approve before anything is written—typed or spoken.
Stack
- React, TypeScript, and Vite on the front end, deployed to Vercel.
- FastAPI (Python) backend on Fly.io.
- Supabase Postgres with row-level security on every table—the AI writes as the signed-in user, never as an admin.
- Gemini with tool calling for the assistant, plus Whisper as a voice-input fallback.
What I learned
- Preview-then-confirm is the right contract for agent writes: the AI proposes a plan, the human approves it, and row-level security limits the blast radius either way.
- Designing security at the database layer instead of the app layer means every client—including the AI—plays by the same rules.
- Encoding "tribal knowledge" into software is still the heart of it: the goal is making group camping feel easy for people who didn't grow up doing it.