Gotten tired of reading posts authored by AI for human consumption, so I thought I’d contribute an original.
I have enough self-awareness to admit that I use LLMs in multiple parts of my day now - even on vacation - but like that old guy in those gritty movies, I refuse to surrender everything that I had learned to do the hard way to AI. I’ve written in the past about how AI is possibly accelerating skill atrophy and that epistle - I was going to refer to it as a treatise but I then looked up its definition and changed my mind - written almost 8 months ago, hasn’t rang truer than it does today. So, I’m writing without AI 😁!
Anyway, back in June, my wife mentioned to me that she was going to reluctantly pay for a wellness app and she asked if I could build something for her instead. Now, I can’t fully remember if that was the exact sequence of events but about 10 days to the end of June 2026, I asked her to tell me, in her own words, why she used the app in addition to sending me a screen recording of the features she liked.
About 36 hours later, a version of the app was on the testing track in the Google Play Store and she loved it. Having her test each new version, make suggestions, report issues and addressing those issues reminded me of the joys of the product-development journey.
At some point (I’d have to check my gut commits to confirm), I decided to add an on-device AI agent, all features working locally without any user data being transmitted to a remote server. This opened up the possibility of differentiating the app from competing apps (meal, weight, water, mood logging, fitness plan generation, AI companion without your data being used to train other models and serve other users) and I took it.
It took a bit of work but after a few submission and review cycles, almighty Google approved “𝐎𝐧𝐲𝐱: 𝐏𝐫𝐢𝐯𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐇𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐭𝐡 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐫” and it’s available for download.
I’ve started working on the iOS version and that should be available in a few weeks (once I’m done jumping through a few Apple hoops).
As I mentioned earlier, I’ve enjoyed the process of building this app which, in fact is a side quest from my main side quest 😂 (a multi-player game with a potentially unlimited game world that’s currently running on a staging environment off my raspberry pi and is currently in beta), and I’m hoping to write more about the experience building this and my other quests - as time allows.