I built my daughter a school app from my phone. While waiting for the car to be fixed.
Half a day. A team of AI agents. And 25 years of software architecture experience.
She’s just started secondary school. Magister, the app her school uses for timetables and grades, won’t run on her older iPhone. So she kept borrowing mine.
My girls already found the interface awkward. Time to do something about it.
I designed the architecture and directed Claude and Codex agents across my Mac mini and a remote server.
Everything from my phone, between a dentist appointment with my daughter and fixing a bicycle tyre in the garden. No laptop.
The biggest challenge? I only had a browser login to get the data. No API or direct connection available to me.
Timetables change daily. Lessons get cancelled that morning. My daughters needed an app they could rely on.
I designed a browser-to-server bridge with near-real-time syncing, access controls and a small database. The last retrieved timetable stays available during outages, with its update time clearly shown.
I decided how the pieces connected, divided the work between agents and steered the build. They wrote every line of code.
My girls loved the fresh colours and girly touches. Clear breaks, green free periods and school start and finish times at a glance. Their boring timetable finally felt like their own app.
They could hardly believe Dad had built it in half a day.
What stayed with me was how much architectural thinking this took. AI handled the coding while I worked through the dependencies, data freshness and what my daughters actually needed.
Some days are surprisingly productive. Car sorted, bicycle tyre fixed, and an app built from scratch to solve a frustration my girls had lived with for ages.