Building Memoir: a health app that's actually supposed to know you
I didn't set out to build a memory system. I set out to build a health app I'd actually want to use — medications, symptoms, workouts, mood, all in one calm place instead of scattered across four different apps that all feel like they were designed by a hospital's IT department in 2011. Warm colors. No dashboards screaming red numbers at you. Something that felt private, not like it was quietly compiling a dossier to sell to an insurer.
The AI chat was supposed to be the easy part. Bolt on Gemini, let people ask it questions about their health data, done. It was not the easy part. It ended up being the part that taught me the most, mostly by breaking in ways I didn't see coming.
The AI that knew a stranger named Himanshu
The first version of the chat "worked" in the sense that it responded to messages. But early on I actually read the code path it used for context, and found this sitting there, dead serious, as the entire personalization layer:
