Using LLMs with a dumb phone

In Turkey, every male citizen has to serve in the military. There's a paid option called bedelli askerlik where you spend a month at a base instead of the usual six. No smartphones allowed, you get a dumb phone with physical buttons and T9 input.

Knowing this ahead of time, I built bilejack-ai before going in. It's a small Android app that acts as a two-way SMS relay between a dumb phone and OpenRouter. You send a text, the app forwards it to an LLM, and the response comes back as SMS. It runs on a spare Android phone with a SIM card, listens for messages from whitelisted numbers, and splits long replies across multiple messages.

Having access to web search and a general-purpose assistant through SMS was more useful than I expected. It's nothing groundbreaking, but I open-sourced it in case someone finds themselves in a similar situation.

Regarding the service itself

Your days are structured: make your bed a certain way, keep your wardrobe in order, shave properly. We walked about 1.5 km through a forest to the training area, 3-4 times a day. I learnt how to use a G3 rifle, carried and maintained it for a week, and shot 3 bullets before giving it back. I actually enjoyed the structure of it all. Of course it has its ridiculous moments, but it is what it is.