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ADR-052: Remove AI Support

  • Status: Accepted
  • Date: 2026-08-11
  • Withdraws: ADR-028 (Ollama/LLaMA integration), ADR-030 (symfony/ai adoption), ADR-042 (optional multi-provider AI, BYO token), ADR-045 (conversational AI trip-brief chat), ADR-046 (temporary AI feature flag), and the historical LLaMA.md architecture note (removed from the docs, kept in git history).
  • Preserves: ADR-048 (in-ride assistance without AI).

Context

The product is pivoting to a native mobile app. AI — trip analysis (per-stage and whole-trip summaries), the conversational chat assistant, itinerary generation from a free-text brief, and the bring-your-own-token multi-provider layer (Anthropic, Google Gemini, OpenAI) — is orthogonal to that pivot. It adds a large, cross-cutting surface (an extra worker, a Messenger transport, DB columns, an encrypted-credential store, a whole API and UI area) that would have to be carried through, and complicate, an upcoming monorepo restructuring.

No production environment exists yet: the app is pre-release, so removing AI now costs nothing in migration or data loss and buys a materially smaller codebase to restructure.

Decision

Remove all AI support:

  • Backend: the Llm and Generation namespaces, the worker-llm service, the llm Messenger transport, the ai_* DB columns, and the API surface (route generation, chat, AiSettings).
  • Frontend: the AI settings, summaries, and chat UI.
  • Encryption key rename: AI_TOKEN_ENC_KEY is renamed REFRESH_TOKEN_ENC_KEY (parameter app.refresh_token_enc_key). It no longer protects any AI provider token; its only remaining role is encrypting auth refresh tokens at rest (RefreshTokenEncryptor, SEC-003 / ADR-023).
  • Preserved: in-ride nearby search (ADR-048) is untouched — it was rebuilt without any LLM on top of the PostGIS Tier-1 index and never depended on the AI stack.

Consequences

  • Reintroducing AI later means re-implementing it, not toggling it back on. The removal PR is the reference diff for what a future implementation would need to restore.
  • The full AI history is preserved through the withdrawn ADRs (ADR-028, ADR-030, ADR-042, ADR-045, ADR-046) and LLaMA.md (git history), each carrying a "Withdrawn" banner pointing here.
  • One encrypted-credential surface is gone; the sole remaining consumer of the encryption key is the refresh-token encryptor, which the rename now reflects.
  • Baseline schema hand-edit (one-time, verified-safe exception). The ai_* columns were removed directly from api/migrations/schema/baseline_schema.sql rather than through the documented migrate + pg_dump --schema-only regeneration its header prescribes. ADR-032's pre-launch addendum sanctions rewriting the baseline while nothing has shipped, and the drop was verified safe (no index, constraint, or comment referenced the dropped columns). This is a deliberate exception, not the standard process — a future baseline change must still go through the documented regeneration.