Why Compass exists

International student status rules — F-1, M-1, J-1, OPT, CPT, grace periods, travel signatures — are scattered across a handful of government sites, change without much warning, and are genuinely consequential to get wrong. Most students figure it out through a DSO appointment, a forum thread, or a friend who went through it first. None of those scale well, and forums in particular can be confidently, dangerously out of date.

Compass is an attempt to do the one thing AI is actually good at here: read a lot of official material quickly and explain it in plain language — without pretending to do the parts AI is bad at, like predicting how immigration officials will treat your specific situation, or replacing a licensed attorney.

So every answer traces back to a live fetch of an official government source, cited and timestamped. When a question crosses from "what is the rule" into "what will happen to me", Compass says so and points you to your DSO or an attorney instead of guessing. One rule — the J-1 two-year home-residency requirement — is hard-coded to always redirect to the Department of State directly, because the only page with a real answer can't be checked automatically, and a partial answer there is worse than none.

There's no account system by design. Building a server-side database that maps identified people to their immigration status is exactly the kind of thing this audience should be wary of, even from a tool trying to help — so your category lives in your browser, not on a server. See the privacy page for the specifics.

Built solo, end to end — the multi-step agent orchestration, the live source-fetching and freshness-checking pipeline, and this interface were all built from scratch for this project rather than reused from an earlier one, since a visa-rights tool has a genuinely different shape of problem than what came before it.