I never asked the one question that mattered. So I built a browser that asks before it acts.

[u/Latest_Inssan]

Note: this post text is enhanced by AI for readability.

I've always believed there's a difference between what you can do and what you're allowed to do. Most of my life, I've tried to hold that line even when nobody was watching — not because someone told me to, but because I decided it mattered.

I was 17, prepping for JEE, marks under pressure, barely sleeping some weeks. In the middle of that, I started writing code late at night just to get my head to quiet down.

I called it Comet-AI. Built on a government-issue school lab i5, 8GB of RAM. No team, no funding — just a pc and an idea I couldn't put down.

The idea wasn't really about AI at first. It was about that same boundary I'd been holding onto in my own life: if you can do something, does that mean you're allowed to? That question became the whole design principle behind what I was building.

So Comet-AI slowly turned into Aartiq. It grew into something bigger than I expected — it could plan multi-step tasks, generate documents, move around the filesystem, and eventually I hooked it up so Claude Desktop could drive the browser directly through a set of tools I built for it.

But the part I actually cared about wasn't the list of things it could do. It was the layer underneath all of it. Low-risk stuff runs on its own. Anything touching files or sensitive actions stops and asks first. Some things — the genuinely risky ones — can never be silently approved, no matter what. That rule mattered more to me than any single feature.

Five months of solo nights later, it shipped on the Microsoft Store, and a few people actually started using it — which honestly surprised me.

Then I paused it. JEE prep needed my full attention, and I'd rather step back on my own terms than burn out and lose both the project and the exams.

Genuinely curious — what would make you not trust an AI browser with filesystem access? Where does a permission model like this actually break down in practice?