Atlas & Ember — Travel Guide Generator

Inspiration

My girlfriend always wants to travel but never knows where to go or how to plan it. Every trip turned into hours of opening dozens of tabs—blogs, maps, weather sites, restaurant reviews—and trying to stitch it all together. I wanted to build something that could turn a single destination into a complete, beautiful travel plan in seconds. That's how Atlas & Ember was born.

What it does

Atlas & Ember turns any destination into a magazine-quality travel itinerary, instantly. You type in where you want to go (and optionally your dates), and it generates:

A day-by-day itinerary with highlights and timing
Live weather forecasts for your travel dates
Restaurant recommendations with what to order
Lodging suggestions across budgets
Local transportation tips
A full budget breakdown

You can save guides to your history, revisit them anytime, and download a polished PDF to take with you.

How I built it

Next.js 15 (App Router) + TypeScript + Tailwind CSS for the frontend
Anthropic Claude API to generate the itinerary content
Open-Meteo API for free, real-time weather forecasts
Streaming responses so users see the guide come to life as it generates, instead of staring at a spinner
localStorage for saving and managing guide history
jsPDF for one-click PDF export
Deployed on Vercel, with Novus.ai analytics to track how people actually use it

What I learned

This was the first time I took something from "I have an idea" all the way to a real, deployed product that anyone can use. I learned how to stream LLM responses in real time, how to debug a production deployment, how to make a public GitHub repo and ship safely, and—most importantly—what "shipping" actually means.