Tell Pharos where you want to go. It turns a short conversation into a personal competency map — a step-by-step learning path with real, hand-curated resources, each one showing where it came from.
Nothing personal ever leaves your iPhone — how that works → Participating in the UNESCO Global MIL Week Youth HackathonYour path is a graph of competencies — each step unlocks the next, from where you already stand to a portfolio-ready capstone.
Every link on your path comes from a hand-curated catalog — never invented, never dead.
Not a generic day-by-day plan. Each step has an outcome, the skills you gain, a suggested project, and clear prerequisites.
Courses, docs and videos come from a human-vetted, link-checked catalog. The AI cannot invent a resource or a URL — misinformation is impossible by design, not just filtered out.
Already know the basics? Pharos prunes what you've mastered and keeps the milestones that actually move you forward.
Set a budget of zero and every resource on your path is free. Pharos never pads a step with paid filler.
Pharos doesn't ask you to trust it. Each resource carries an authority badge, and a whole tab shows the vetted universe every link is drawn from — grouped by tier, each with the reason that kind of source is credible.
An international body that defines the rules others follow.
W3C · OWASP · NISTA university or accredited programme with formal academic backing.
Python for Everybody · Michigan · picoCTF · Carnegie MellonFirst-party documentation, written by the people who build the tool.
MDN · Apple Developer · PyTorchA nonprofit whose mission is open, free education.
freeCodeCamp · Khan Academy · The Odin ProjectA recognised industry authority or research lab in its field.
Nielsen Norman Group · PortSwigger · KaggleA named educator with a public track record.
StatQuest · 3Blue1Brown · Hacking with SwiftBadges are computed on your device from the source's address — deterministic, offline, never decided by the AI. Above every list of resources, permanently: vetted sources, never AI-generated.
While Pharos charts your path, its little sun keeps you company. It usually takes under a minute — and you can ask to be notified and put your phone down.
The same warm light guides you through the whole app: onboarding chat, the map, every step of the way.
Three steps from “I want to change careers” to a map you can walk.
A short onboarding conversation — powered by an Apple foundation model running offline on your iPhone — captures your goal, level, time, and budget. Everything personal is understood on-device; your name and photo never leave your iPhone.
Your anonymous profile selects a curated career template. Steps you already master are pruned; the rest is ordered so every step builds on the one before.
Your path appears as a winding trail of stepping stones. Complete a step to light up the next — one steady milestone at a time, all the way to your capstone project.
Pharos participates in the UNESCO Youth Hackathon, where young people build practical solutions to today's information challenges — misinformation, unethical AI, and unequal access to trustworthy knowledge. Pharos answers all three, not with a disclaimer, but with its architecture.
Generative AI is known to invent sources. Pharos removes that failure mode: every resource on a path exists in a human-curated, verified catalog before the AI ever sees it. The model can describe and choose — it can never fabricate.
AI plays a bounded, transparent role: it writes explanations and adapts the path to your level. Structure, links, and facts stay under human curation. That division of labour is exactly the kind of AI literacy MIL teaches.
Set a budget of zero and the whole path stays free — real, quality resources, never paid filler. Trustworthy learning shouldn't depend on what you can spend. That's community impact by default.
Most AI apps send your conversation to the cloud and promise to treat it well. Pharos is built so the promise isn't needed: personal data physically cannot reach a server, because it is never sent.
The onboarding chat runs on Apple's Foundation Models directly on your iPhone. Your conversation — and everything personal in it — is processed offline and never uploaded, to us or to anyone.
The on-device model distills your chat into a small technical profile: career, level, hours, budget, formats, skills, goals. That's the only thing the server ever receives — the request format has no field for a name.
The backend is stateless: it builds your path and forgets you. No user database, no profiles on file, no history. Your path lives in one place only — your iPhone.
There is nothing to sign up for and nothing watching you. No analytics SDKs, no advertising identifiers, no location. Deleting the app deletes your data — because it was only ever yours.
Processed offline by Apple Foundation Models. Stored locally. Removed when you delete the app.
Anonymous and technical — no name, no photo, no email, no device identifier, no account. Used once to build the path, then discarded. The cloud model that writes your path's text runs on a tier whose terms exclude prompts and responses from AI training — and it never sees a name in the first place.
A tool that asks you to check where information comes from has to make its own checkable. The app, the curated catalog, the authority taxonomy and the tests that run before every release are public — not "available on request".
Read the source on GitHubThree of us, across Italy and Mexico, all inside the age range this is built for. Every decision in Pharos started as a frustration one of us had personally.
iOS development & Apple technology integration
Builds the app and its on-device intelligence, and the backend that assembles every learning path.
MIL content design & engineering support
Designs the media-and-information-literacy layer: the authority tiers, the source-vetting rubric, and how provenance is explained. Curates the catalog the backend runs on.
UX & product strategy
Leads the learner experience: the onboarding flow, the map that makes a path legible, and the accessibility and cross-cultural perspective that keeps Pharos usable everywhere.
Two women and one man, in two countries. Young women stay underrepresented in the careers Pharos covers, and the barrier is rarely capability — it is the cost of being watched while you are still a beginner. So there is no account, no public profile, no leaderboard, no ranking against peers and no behavioural tracking. Explore a career nobody expects of you, and leave no trace. Reach the whole team at pharos26academy@gmail.com.