Goodbye AI, hello NLP

This update completely changed how Breakdown works. The screenshots are from review of the Meta (Facebook) ToS and the Hack Club ToS, see if you can tell which one is which and comment it 😉

Originally it used a 1-2 GB language model running through WebLLM. It worked, but startup was slow, downloads were huge, and it could still hallucinate clauses that weren’t actually in a policy.

I replaced the entire pipeline with a deterministic rule-based NLP engine that runs fully on-device. I briefly kept a small embedding model to catch unusual wording, but testing showed it was responsible for almost every false positive, so I removed that too.

What changed

• Removed all AI models and embeddings.
• No downloads or GPU required.
• Fully offline and deterministic.
• Analyzer shrunk to just 18 KB.

Biggest challenge

The hardest part was keeping the results accurate without relying on AI. I rewrote detection around sentence-level rules, proper negation handling, and much stricter legal clause matching, then built a new test suite using real-world policies to make sure false positives stayed gone.

The result

• Removed 49 npm packages.
• Deleted the entire AI pipeline.
• Faster analysis with no waiting.
• More reliable results than the original AI version.