I love my wife dearly, we have plenty of amusing and fun conversations, and she humors my tendency to geek out when talking about technical topics. While she may lack understanding in programming, coding and system design, give her a public murder trial and she will write you a book on her internet sleuthing. One thing she is adamant about is her supplement and self care schedule, and who can fault her, anyone would want to retain the beauty she has and has had for the last decade we have been together. Unfortunately, the schedule has grown into a giant living document in the most literal sense. There’s a retinoid that only happens Monday, Wednesday, Friday, with a warning attached about not sealing it in on her forehead and nose. There’s a rice peel that’s Tuesday and Sunday, nose only. There’s a facial device where every day of the week is a different mode with different products and a different goal, and she found herself starting to get overwhelmed with tracking it all. Enter, the semi-helpful husband…
What she wanted was something she could dynamically change, without having to understand coding, and without having to fuss with mobile list interfaces, something she could track in a document, and the site could visualize for her. Some supplements are daily, some are every other day, one of them tracks its own start date because the cycle resets. She adds and drops things constantly as she figures out what’s working. It just so happened that in the early days of my adoption of Claude this year I was searching for projects and ideas to experiment on and learn with, and this happened to be the perfect use case. My profession has granted me significant familiarity with hosting in AWS, and she had just been day dreaming about an app or site that can track her organically growing scheduled items.
Enter the semi-helpful husband… Yes, it had to be said twice! We sat down, thought out the idea and design, went through a few iterations of what she was willing to manage in a document style config and then I built her a little serverless PWA to track all of it; Cognito and API Gateway and a single Python Lambda sitting in front of DynamoDB. The routine data itself living as a Markdown file in a versioned S3 bucket. It took about two days into planning the admin screens for me to stop and admit to myself that the admin screens were the whole project. The tracker logic UI was a weekend. A simple form flexible enough to transform “Tuesday and Sunday, nose only, wash off after” into a user friendly interface. Trying to manage that with a whole Admin interface was like bringing a Slivers deck to a friendly relaxing MTG gathering…
So there’s no admin UI. She just opens Claude Code.
Her session and my session
The website repository has three instruction files. CLAUDE.md has the shared project context, CLAUDE.dev.md is mine, and CLAUDE.wife.md is hers. Hers opens with a line telling Claude this session is for managing routines and supplements, not for coding, and from there it reads like a job description written for a very patient AI assistant.
She talks to it in plain language. “I want to add ashwagandha, I take it at night with dinner, one capsule every day.” It restates the change back to her and waits for a yes before touching anything. Her session is allowed to edit exactly one file, REQUESTS.md, and the only terminal commands it’s permitted to run are the git add, commit, and push of that one file after she confirms. It’s also forbidden from using technical vocabulary with her, and yes, the instruction file contains an actual list of banned words: JSON, API, deploy, commit, branch, etc. When it saves her request it says “Brad will pick this up next time he works on the app,” which is both non-technical and, she would probably note, an optimistic characterization of my turnaround time.
I find her requests in REQUESTS.md whenever I next sit down in my own session. Pull, read, build or edit whatever she asked for, deploy, move the request to the completed section. The whole exchange lives in git history, her half committed from her machine, my half from mine. We’ve never had a conflict, though I’ll admit that’s less about the elegant file separation and more about there being exactly two users who are married to each other.
You may ask, why not just TALK about the changes she wants, that would be a valid question, but we both work, are parents of our son and dog, have our own interests, etc. By the time we sit down to have time together, the last thing I want it spent on is things like this, we much rather enjoy the few hours together we have alone doing something fun or silly (We love the silliness, if you know you know…). This allows her and I to track changes she wants whenever she thinks of them and whenever I have time to sit down and open up the side project. Sure I may get the constant reminder similar to taking out the trash that something is waiting for me to do in the REQUESTS file, but at least now she doesn’t need to hold onto a thought all day until she gets home to explain it to me to implement.
The health rule
One section of her file went through more revisions than everything else combined, and it has nothing to do with git. She’s managing real actives and real supplements, things that genuinely interact, and the failure mode I kept coming back to was Claude being agreeable with her about what is safe to take. These models want to be encouraging. Ask one “is it fine to take X with Y” in a warm, helpful session and the gravitational pull is toward “yes, that should be fine!”
So her file says, in nearly these words: never present supplement interactions or skincare chemistry as fact unless it’s well-supported with evidence, if you’re not certain, say so explicitly and point her at her doctor or pharmacist. There’s a line that reads “Do not reassure her that something is fine just to be encouraging,” which is me trying to legislate a personality trait out of a language model with a sentence of prose. I spot-check her transcripts now and then. It’s held for the most part so far. I don’t fully trust it, and I’ve made peace with not fully trusting it at the current stakes, maybe if she moved to more serious substances that could cause issues like real medications I would re-evaluate these as hooks instead of rules.
The skincare request
She asked for the skincare section of the app, conversationally, over however many minutes it took, and what landed in REQUESTS.md was: four AM steps in display order, the Mon/Wed/Fri retinoid nights as a three-step sequence with the sealing warning shown, the Tuesday/Sunday peel flagged as needing a frequency type the app didn’t support yet, and the weekly device table called out as a new display format entirely since it’s a reference, not a checklist.
I’ve received worse specs from paying customers or coworkers. I’ve WRITTEN worse specs than that myself. She doesn’t know what a frequency tag is, but the conversation surfaced that Tuesday-and-Sunday didn’t fit any existing pattern, and the request captured it, confirmed, in her words plus enough structure for me to build from. It’s not a perfect system, but for personal use in a family it works for now.
The remaining friction is honestly just my personality and her habit. Opening a terminal isn’t a natural gesture for her, and I keep meaning to wrap the whole thing in an icon she can tap. I haven’t, partly time, partly because the small ceremony of it has a side effect I like, she batches her changes into one sitting instead of sending me seven one-line requests across a week. Whether that’s a real design insight or me retroactively justifying not doing the work, I genuinely can’t tell you.