---
title: "Open Source at Nowah: What We Share and Why"
description: "Our philosophy on open source contribution, the internal tools we plan to share, and why building in public is a competitive advantage for AI startups."
canonical: https://nowah.xyz/blog/open-source-at-nowah
lastModified: "2026-08-07T03:48:58.595Z"
---

# Open Source at Nowah: What We Share and Why

Our philosophy on open source contribution, the internal tools we plan to share, and why building in public is a competitive advantage for AI startups.

We could not have built Nowah without open source software. the mobile app framework, Express, a single typed language across the stack, a relational database, an in-memory data store. Our entire stack is built on foundations that thousands of engineers contributed for free. That creates an obligation to give back, and it creates an opportunity we would be foolish to ignore.

## What we depend on

![Illustration for this section](https://pics.nowah.xyz/website-media/engineering-055-img-1.webp)

The list of open source projects in our dependency tree is long. The runtime is Node.js. The language is a single typed language across the stack. The mobile framework is a cross-platform mobile framework. The web framework is the web framework. The database ORM handles our a relational database queries. The queue system processes [background jobs](/blog/background-jobs-ai-travel-booking). The testing framework runs our eval suites.

None of these are trivial projects. Each one represents years of engineering effort by communities that chose to share their work. We benefit from that generosity every day, and we take the responsibility of being good community members seriously. That means filing detailed bug reports when we find issues. It means contributing fixes upstream when we can. It means not forking projects unnecessarily.

## What we plan to share

We have built several internal tools that solve problems other AI teams face too. We plan to open source them once they are stable and documented enough to be useful outside our specific context.

Our eval framework for testing AI agent behavior against conversation datasets is one candidate. Many teams building AI agents need a way to run structured evaluations, and the tooling options are limited. Our framework is opinionated about the travel domain, but the core evaluation pipeline is domain-agnostic.

Our streaming utilities for unidirectional server streaming in a single typed language backend are another. Server streaming is straightforward in theory but has enough edge cases (connection drops, backpressure, client reconnection) that a well-tested library saves real time.

We are also considering open sourcing our conversation replay tooling for debugging AI agent behavior. It is the kind of tool that every AI product team ends up building from scratch, and sharing a starting point would save the community collective effort.

## The business case

![Supporting diagram](https://pics.nowah.xyz/website-media/engineering-055-img-2.webp)

Open source is not charity for us. It is strategy. There are three concrete business benefits.

First, recruiting. The engineers we want to hire read engineering blogs and contribute to open source projects. Having a public engineering presence means candidates find us organically. Several of our best hires cited our [technical writing](/blog/technical-writing-ai-teams-documentation) or open source work as the reason they applied.

Second, credibility. The AI travel space is crowded with vaporware. Companies announce "AI-powered booking" and deliver a chatbot that links to a search form. Publishing real engineering content and shipping real open source tools is proof that we actually build what we say we build.

Third, community feedback. When other engineers use your tools, they find bugs you missed and suggest improvements you did not think of. This [feedback loop](/blog/feedback-loop-post-trip-data-improves-ai) makes the tools better for everyone, including us.

## Building in public

We write this engineering blog. We share architecture decisions. We discuss trade-offs honestly. That transparency is uncomfortable sometimes, especially when we are writing about things that did not work. But it builds trust with the engineering community in a way that polished marketing never can.

The bet is simple: the engineers who read our blog and use our open source tools today are the engineers who might join our team, partner with us, or build on our platform tomorrow. Open source and public engineering are long-term investments in relationships with the technical community, and those relationships compound over time.

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Nowah is an AI travel agent that searches and books real flights and hotels through conversation — no filters, no thirty open tabs. [Plan your next trip](https://app.nowah.xyz).