Startline AI — MCP server, web app & voice API

The serving layer for Startline AI: an AI companion for motorsport event documents. One process gives you an MCP server for AI agents, a phone-first event-day web app, a voice endpoint for Siri, amendment diffs and calendar export — all over a local document vault.

Built after marshalling at a Formula 1 event, where the official app delivers PDFs but can't answer "what time does sign-on close on Saturday?" — and where an amendment is just another PDF that never tells you what changed.

Two kinds of search

Index search — SQLite FTS5 + BM25 over heading-level chunks with event-jargon synonyms (sign-on = muster, MxM = minute x minute). Instant, deterministic, works with no signal at the track.

Agent search — an MCP server exposing nine typed tools, so an AI assistant can reason across documents and cite pages:

Tool	Purpose
list_events / event_overview	inventory, categories, amendment count
list_docs	filter by event and category
search	full-text with citations
read_doc	fuzzy name match, pages="3-5" slicing
schedule_for	parsed day timeline, with amendment warnings attached
diff_amendment	what an amendment actually changed
amendments / doc_history	version chains

Register it with any MCP client:

{ "mcpServers": { "startline": {
    "command": "uv",
    "args": ["run", "--directory", "/path/to/startline-server", "startline-mcp"]
}}}

Amendment diffs

The feature the official apps don't have. Each amendment is structurally diffed against the schedule it amends — rows matched by normalised text and classified moved / added / removed inside the amendment's time window — then summarised:

"The one-minute signal to the marshalling area is delayed from 17:09 to 17:24, and the reconnaissance lap release from 17:10 to 17:25. A new 20-minute signal checkpoint has been added at 17:15."

Results are cached by content hash, so each amendment costs one model call ever.

Running it

uv sync
uv run startline-mcp        # MCP server (stdio)
uv run startline-serve      # web app + voice API on :8095
uv run startline-caption    # vision-caption maps and diagrams (cached)

Point it at a vault with STARTLINE_VAULT=/path/to/vault (default ~/startline-vault). AI features need ANTHROPIC_API_KEY in the environment; without it, index search and the offline answer fallback still work.

Endpoints

Route	What
/	event-day web app — day chips, NOW/NEXT timeline, filter, amendment banner, ask box
/ask?q=	answer engine (used by the web app, Siri and the iOS app)
/api/events, /api/schedule, /api/diff	JSON for clients
/calendar.ics?day=&q=	RFC 5545 export, optionally filtered

Answers come back in the language the question was asked in — a Vietnamese question gets a Vietnamese answer, while document titles stay in the original.

Voice

SIRI-SETUP.md has the Apple Shortcut recipe (dictate → HTTP → speak) and a launchd plist for running the server permanently. The iOS app below does this natively with an App Intent.

Vision captions

Maps, gate diagrams and notice photos carry no extractable text, so they are invisible to search. startline-caption sends the rendered pages to a vision model, asks it to describe the page and transcribe every label, and caches the result by content hash. Ingest bakes captions into the notes, which makes questions like "how do I get through the zone fence near post 2.5?" answerable from an image.

Related repos

Repo	Role
startline-vault	ingest pipeline + offline index search
startline-ios	native SwiftUI client

License

MIT