Dawa Saathi: I finally finished the part of my medicine bot that actually mattered

AI medicine-awareness bot worked — but only in English, the one language most of the people I built it for can't read. Here's the problem, the one-day sprint to fix it, and how GitHub Copilot got me through it. GitHub Finish-Up-A-Thon submission. I shipped this project months ago, but it was never truly finished — it was missing the one feature that decided whether a real person in my own community could use it. This challenge was the push that made me sit down and close that gap in a single night. The problem we face In India, you can walk into most pharmacies and buy prescription drugs without a prescription. We've quietly normalized something genuinely dangerous, and the research is blunt about it. A simulated-patient study in Bengaluru sent two researchers into 261 pharmacies with fake symptoms. Antibiotics were handed over without any prescription at roughly two-thirds (66.7%) of them. Not a single pharmacy warned about side effects. Only about one in five even mentioned that a doctor's prescription was needed. The "guidance" most people walked out with was "take it twice a day" — and nothing else. ( study ) Here is the part that kept me up at night: it's not because people are careless. The shopkeeper isn't a doctor. The label is printed in tiny English. A proper consultation costs time and money many families simply don't have. So people take what they're handed — and hope it's fine. Why it's important This isn't a small inconvenience. Taking the wrong medicine, or the right medicine the wrong way, is one of the biggest drivers of antibiotic resistance — the slow disaster where medicines stop working. The landmark 2019 Lancet GRAM study estimated 1.27 million deaths worldwide were directly attributable to drug-resistant infections in a single year. In India alone, an estimated 297,000 deaths were directly attributable to AMR, and about 1.04 million were associated with it. ( Lancet GRAM 2019 , India figures ) I'm not a doctor and I can't change how medicines