Own build · Everyday AI
Four users who tell me on Monday if it didn’t work.
A family of four, two calendars that don’t agree, a freezer nobody remembers the contents of, and the question every afternoon at five: what’s for dinner? I built a small system of AI agents that runs our week, and my family is the toughest user group I’ve had.
The problem
The week fails in the gaps between systems.
The school has one calendar, the family has another, the fridge has a third truth, and the supermarkets change their offers every week. Each piece is simple. Keeping them in sync, week after week, is what nobody has time for.
My responsibility
The concept and the rules. Which agents exist, what each one may decide, what it must ask about first, and where the single source of truth lives. Claude does the work; the product calls are mine.
The decision that mattered
Small agents, one rulebook.
Instead of one big assistant, a set of small ones that click together: a meal planner, an offer hunter, an inventory app, a weekly one-pager for the fridge, an activity planner, and a “nothing planned, I’m hungry now” helper. They all read the same rulebook, and none of them keeps its own copy of a rule, because two copies always drift apart.
And one hard line: an agent may suggest, but it shows me before it writes. Changes to the inventory come as a short list I approve. What the agent is unsure about becomes a question, not a guess in the database.
What happened
It runs every week. Sunday evening the plan, the shopping list and the week on one A4 page are ready, and the page goes on the fridge. The agents look up what they can (calendars, offers, what’s in stock) and ask only what they can’t, in one message. The calendar closes the loop: a planned dinner without a calendar entry didn’t happen, so its fresh ingredients get used first the next week.
What I learned
- The hard input isn’t data. It’s reality: a photo of the open fridge beats any database.
- Rules belong in one place. The moment a rule lives in two files, nobody knows which one applies.
- Trust comes from asking before writing. The family accepts suggestions; it doesn’t accept a system that quietly changes things.
- An agent that knows when to say “nothing” is worth more. Sometimes the best plan for the weekend is no plan.