I built an AI operating system for my family
Why most of what I make starts at home — and how Hearthwise turned our family's chaos of emails, forms, and deadlines into something we can actually stay on top of.
- AI
- Family
- Build Log
If you look at the things I build outside of work, there’s an obvious pattern: most of them start at home. A chore app for the kids. A way to preserve family stories. And the one I lean on most — Hearthwise, an AI “operating system” for our family’s life.
The problem with running a household
A family generates a firehose of information. School newsletters, appointment reminders, contractor estimates, forms due next week, the occasional thing that genuinely matters and needs a paper trail. It all arrives in the same inbox, and the important stuff hides in the noise.
I didn’t want another to-do app. I wanted something that would read the firehose for me.
What Hearthwise does
It connects to Gmail, and uses AI to triage everything that comes in — classifying each message and pulling out the deadlines, events, and action items automatically. Then it sorts what it finds into two worlds:
- Matters — the serious things (legal, medical, a dispute). These get a timeline, an evidence index, and exportable PDF packets.
- Life Items — the everyday stuff (schedules, newsletters) that should stay quick and glanceable.
Scheduled jobs send daily reminders, keep polling for new mail, and publish a calendar feed, so the system stays a step ahead of us instead of waiting to be checked.
Why family is the best brief
Building for the people you live with is the most honest product feedback loop there is. If it doesn’t actually make our week easier, I hear about it at dinner. That constraint has made me a better engineer than any work project — and it’s why “family-first” isn’t a tagline for me so much as a description of where the ideas come from.