Frankie
In beta, by text message. The public page is still a waitlist.
Frankie is a weekend-planning friend for Orange County moms that lives in text messages. Every Friday morning it sends each family a plan built from real local events, the kids' ages, the city, the budget and, if you connect it, your calendar. The rest of the week you can text it questions. It also has a flare for telling friends what you're up to without starting a group chat.
The story
I built a newsletter so OC parents could find things to do on weekends. I still couldn't figure out what to do on weekends. I had become the person who tells thousands of moms what to do every weekend, and I still couldn't figure out how to see my own friends.
So I built Frankie. I'm in tech. This is what we do instead of therapy, apparently. I'm building it myself, learning to develop the software with AI as I go, often after my daughters are asleep.
- Launched
- First real Friday send on August 21, 2026. Real beta testers from September 4, 2026.
A few tips
- Build an agent, not a keyword parser. The first version matched keywords, and that was its fatal flaw.
- Merged is not done. Deployed and tried is done.
- Every bad reply becomes a failing test case first, then gets fixed.
- No patching. Give the agent true context through tools and data, never a fence around the symptom.
Related files on this desktop
Tools I used for this project
Claude Code: Built the whole thing in slices from a written plan, each with a checklist for what done looks like.
Codex: Reviews every change before it merges.Claude Haiku and SonnetTelnyx
Render: Hosts the app, the database and the scheduled jobs.StripeResend
Google Calendar: Lets Frankie plan around what is already on the family calendar.
GitHub Actions: Runs the tests and a 3am evaluation of what Frankie actually says.
