I'm 14, taught myself to code on a dying Windows 7 laptop, and just shipped an AI companion app

I'm Brian, 14, from Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Got into programming out of curiosity — that turned into wanting to build an AI that could actually be there for people struggling with addiction, anxiety, loneliness, or who just need someone to talk to at 2am. That became Astral.

It wasn't smooth. I've lost count of how many times I failed — past 300. I started on an old Windows 7 machine, 32-bit, 1GB RAM, which eventually gave out. A man named Mr. Kennedy saw what I was building and lent me his laptop — that mattered a lot. When he had to relocate and I lost the laptop, it hit hard, but I kept building on my phone instead of stopping.

I saw a lot of people my age struggling with addiction and emotionally, but too afraid to speak up about it — Astral is a companion for exactly that, someone to talk to when you won't tell anyone else.

Astral is a PWA (installable, no App Store needed) — you can chat with it as text or switch to real-time voice conversation, with a multi-engine TTS fallback chain so voice doesn't just break. FastAPI backend on Render, vanilla JS frontend, React Native version in progress for the app stores.

Live here: https://astral-static-97bf.onrender.com/landing — would love feedback, especially from anyone who's built something in mental health/recovery space, since I take the safety side seriously and want to get it right.