I'm Autistic and non-verbal some days, so I built my partner a way to check in on me without needing words.

Alt text: a screenshot of a web-based app that displays an emoji, a status, a "doing" section and a "note section". The web app is showing a demo of a manually set status of "Watching Youtube"

Disclaimer: I'm not a coder. I've tried to learn and it genuinely hurts my brain. This is my first attempt at vibe coding anything, specifically a web app.

I'm Autistic and often non-verbal. On those days my partner struggles, because she doesn't always know how to help and I'm not talking, so communication between us takes a hit right when it matters most. I was inspired by u/brokenodo and their project to build my own answer to this.

Stage one is getting it working on the web so it runs on my partner's phone.

Stage three, if I somehow pull all that off, is a crowdfund to build it into a real product.

Right now I'm just testing it with my partner for the next week to see if it actually fixes the problem, because building something nobody needs is a waste of time.

On my side there's a settings page and an update page where I can post however I like. I can write as little as four words or as many as forty. If I fill the fields in manually it posts as-is, like a social media status. If I don't know or don't really wanna type much, it sends that short text to Claude through the Anthropic API, which interprets it into an emoji, an emotion label, what I'm doing and a note. It always shows me exactly how my words were understood and lets me change any field before anything publishes, so the AI never broadcasts a wrong read of my state without me seeing it first. Because the input is tiny, it costs almost nothing per update through the API.

My partner sees her own settings, mostly accessibility ones since she's legally blind and needs large text and high contrast. She sees the status page too, and can react to what I've posted with a small set of emoji, which sends me a notification that she's reacted.

It's hosted free on Vercel, connected to a private GitHub repo, so the whole thing runs at basically no cost beyond the tiny API usage. I'm still actively building, adding features that either improve accessibility or make the experience better.

I know there are a million "what I'm shipping" posts a day, but this one's a bit different. It's built by an Autistic person, for an Autistic person. I hope to share more as it develops, maybe ship a public v1, and further down the line the hardware device.

I'd love to hear from any other disabled folks who'd find something like this useful. Thanks for checking it out. This post was written by me but tweaked to be readable and understood easily with the help of Claude.