Brev

The first version of Brev translated the letter and I thought that was the product. It took me an embarrassingly long time to notice that a page of perfectly correct English left me exactly as stuck as the Swedish had.

Knowing what the words say is not the same as knowing what the letter means. A faithful translation of a notice from Skatteverket will tell you every word of it and still not tell you the thing you need, which is whether this one is routine or whether a clock started when it was posted. That knowledge is local rather than linguistic. Nobody hands it to you when you arrive, and you acquire it by getting one of them wrong.

If you have moved countries you know the pile. Four envelopes by the door with official-looking crests, none of them opened. You are not avoiding them because you cannot read them. You are avoiding them because opening one means finding out which kind it is, and the pile is cheaper than the answer right up until it is not.

What it does

Photograph the letter. It tells you who sent it and what they want from you, with the date if there is one.

The country packs are the actual work. Each one knows which institutions really write to people living there and which of their letters have consequences attached. The model reads your letter and the pack supplies the context, so what comes back is an answer instead of a translation.

What I was stubborn about

Nothing to maintain. You are standing in a hallway with an open envelope in one hand. Anything that assumes you will come back later and file something has misread the moment entirely. It answers, then it forgets.

No account for the first letter. The first letter is the one that decides whether you keep the app. Asking for an email address before someone has found out whether it works is asking them to trust you on faith with their post.

Careful with the most private thing you own. Letters carry your address and your ID numbers. It asks for as little as it can and keeps the rest out of the building.

Right about the date above all else. Most of what it tells you can be roughly useful. The deadline cannot. If a clock is running, that is the whole reason the app exists, and it goes somewhere you cannot scroll past.

Open questions

I do not know how many packs this needs before it is useful rather than charming. Five countries covers the people I know, which is not a market, and each pack is real research rather than a config file.

I also suspect the moment of highest value is the moment of lowest trust. Someone who has just moved somewhere is exactly the person who should be careful about photographing official post into an app they found last week, and I have not solved that beyond asking for very little and saying so plainly.