We kept missing things. So I built an AI that lives in our family group chat.

We have two kids, two jobs, and a paper calendar on the fridge we actually use. Not because we prefer paper, because every app we tried required both of us to change our behavior, and we could never make the habit stick.

So we went back to paper

A calendar on the fridge sounds like giving up. But it worked better than anything we tried digitally, because it was always visible and required no behavior change from either of us. The problem is paper doesn't remind you of anything. It doesn't travel with you. And when you're standing in a store trying to remember if Saturday is already booked, the fridge isn't much help.

So I built something that lives in our group chat

I'm not an engineer by training, but with AI I decided to try building something. The idea was simple: instead of asking us to change our behavior, meet us where we already are. We're already texting each other about the kids' schedules. What if the assistant just lived in that same group?

That's Callie.

Now when my wife texts "Shay ballet is every Saturday at 10:30 until May" and it goes straight to the calendar. When I say "remind me to call the school tomorrow at 9am" and I get pinged at 9am. When one of us forwards a flight confirmation and the trip is blocked automatically. The paper calendar on the fridge is still there. But we don't miss things anymore.

The part I didn't expect to matter as much

Callie connects to a shared Google Calendar. Every event she adds shows up on our phones, our laptops, the widgets on our lock screens. We didn't have to change how we check our schedules. We just stopped being the ones responsible for keeping everything updated.

What we actually use it for

Day-to-day it's pretty mundane, which is exactly the point:

• "We need milk, eggs, and bread" adds them to the grocery list
• "Callie dentist Tuesday at 3pm" blocks the calendar
• Forwarding a flight or hotel confirmation adds the trip automatically
• The morning digest tells us what's happening today before we've had coffee
• Push reminders for the things neither of us can afford to forget

The things we used to drop (the dentist rescheduled, the school pickup changed, the dinner reservation confirmed) don't fall through the cracks anymore because neither of us has to remember to update anything. We just say it in the group and it's handled.

On privacy

No ads. No data selling. Ever.

When I started sharing this with friends, the first question was always: "So you can read everything we type to it?"

It's a fair question. The honest answer is that I've deliberately built it so I can't.

The dashboard I use to monitor the product shows usage patterns (how many families used it, how many calendar events were added) but never content. No event titles. No task text. No grocery items. That data belongs to your family, not to me. I'm not running ads. I'm not building an audience to sell to.

I built this because my family needed it. I think a lot of families have the same problem we did.

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