Yesterday a solo builder quietly shipped a fishing planner that’s smarter than it should be for a side project. It’s open source, it’s free, and the author named it Fishing Intelligence (his words, parenthetical “LOL” included). The build itself is cool. The architecture decision buried inside it is the part worth stealing.
What’s New
A developer going by u/that1hairdude posted the tool on r/PromptEngineering, and the pitch is simple: a reusable AI fishing planner that remembers its own checklist instead of making you restate the rules every single trip. Licenses, protected zones, tides, weather, boat requirements, the planner holds all of it so you don’t have to re-explain your region from scratch each time.
That alone is a decent utility. What makes it interesting is what the author found while building it: finding a source wasn’t the hard part. Trusting the right source, for the right trip, in the right way, was.
Compare that to the usual AI research agent pattern: search, grab a result, cite it, move on. Most of those agents stop at “is this a real source.” This one keeps going and asks a second, harder question: does this real source actually govern my exact situation right now.
The Twist
Here’s where it gets good. Most AI tools treat “official source” as a magic word. Government site says it, so it must apply. This builder split that single judgment into three separate ones:
- what kind of evidence this is
- whether it’s actually current and verified
- whether it applies to this specific trip
So a source can be AUTHORITATIVE and VERIFIED_CURRENT and still land as only CONDITIONAL. A rule from the right agency, confirmed as up to date, can still not apply to your boat, your zone, or your season. And if something important can’t be verified, the plan stays provisional instead of quietly filling the gap with a guess. That’s the twist: a planner that’s willing to say “I don’t know yet” instead of faking confidence.
Step-by-Step Mini-Workflow
Here’s roughly how a trip gets built, based on what the author described testing:
- 🎣 Pick the trip: home turf, or a region with zero prebuilt setup.
- 📋 Pull every relevant source: fisheries rules, licenses, protected areas, nav notices, weather, tides, boat requirements.
- 🏷️ Tag each one on all three axes: evidence type, verification status, applicability to this exact trip.
- ⚠️ Anything that can’t be verified gets flagged provisional, not smoothed over.
- Ship the plan with those flags intact, so you know exactly what’s solid and what still needs a second check.
The author stress-tested this against his home region in Australia, then again in Key Largo, Florida, where there was no prebuilt regional setup at all. The tool had to derive fisheries rules, licensing, protected areas, nav notices, weather, tides, and boat requirements from live sources on the fly. That second test matters more than the first. It’s the difference between a tool that works because it was hand-built for one place, and a tool that actually reasons.
Pro Tips
If you’re building anything that leans on an AI pulling from “official” sources (compliance checkers, research assistants, planning agents), steal this exact split. Don’t let “authoritative” and “applicable” collapse into one flag. A source can be perfectly legitimate and still wrong for this specific case, and your system needs a way to say that out loud.
Second tip: build your provisional state before you build your confident state. It’s tempting to make the happy path first and bolt uncertainty handling on later. This author did it the other way, and it’s why the Florida test held up instead of quietly hallucinating a boat requirement that didn’t exist.
One commenter nailed why this matters: most tools slap “trusted source” on something and call it done, then the whole plan falls apart the moment that source doesn’t actually fit the trip. The conditional/authoritative split is the fix for that exact failure mode, and it’s cheap to copy into a system prompt even if you never touch a boat.
Third tip: run your own two-region test before you trust any planning agent, fishing or otherwise. One well-tuned region tells you almost nothing about whether the reasoning generalizes. A second region with messy, undocumented rules tells you everything.
Go Poke Holes In It
The repo’s public and the author is actively asking for the kind of feedback that stings a little: what’s wrong with the architecture, not just whether it’s “pretty good.” If you fish somewhere with messy, overlapping, badly organized official sources, that’s precisely the stress test this thing wants. Go grab it, point it at your weirdest local jurisdiction, and report back what breaks ⚓
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How does Fishing Intelligence avoid hallucinating data like other planning tools?
Instead of filling gaps with guesses, it flags information that can’t be verified and keeps plans provisional. The verification chain separates source authority from currency and real-world applicability, so even official sources get challenged if they’re outdated or only conditionally relevant to your specific trip.
Q: What’s the deal with the ‘conditional’ vs ‘authoritative’ split?
Most tools treat official sources as universally true and applicable. Fishing Intelligence separates whether something is from a trusted source from whether it actually applies to your scenario. An official tide chart might be authoritative but not current, or a fishing rule might be authoritative but only seasonal, and you’ll see that distinction upfront.
Q: Is this overwhelming to set up if I just want a quick trip plan?
The config can be thorough for a side project, which might intimidate casual users. A minimal preset option (just location + date) could help beginners get started, though the full verification features become more valuable as you fish in regions with complex, overlapping regulations.
Q: How does it handle areas with disorganized fishing rules?
It was specifically tested in Florida where official sources are fragmented across multiple agencies. Instead of relying on prebuilt regional data, it discovers fisheries rules, licenses, protected areas, and boat requirements from current sources, so it adapts to messy real-world situations.
Q: How does this compare to commercial fishing planning tools?
Testers found it stronger at avoiding hallucination and explicitly flagging gaps where commercial tools often stay silent. It’s free and open-source, so the trade-off is polished features for transparency and a verification-first philosophy.