When I started building Warmth, I had AI hype like everyone else. I thought: what if the app writes a weekly recap? What if it can write a love letter to my partner based on our weekly diary?
I hooked up a third-party model and built those features. In fact, they were the app's main selling point at the time.
Then my partner and I started using the app every day. One evening, I logged a simple note: "The latte you made today is so delicious!" Then I tapped the button to generate a letter.
The app gave back something like this:
"My love,
When you handed me that latte today, it was more than just coffee. It was a gentle reminder of how lucky I am to have someone who cares for me in the smallest moments. Every sip felt like a warm embrace. Thank you for filling my life with sweetness.
Forever yours,"
It read like a greeting card. Nobody talks to the person they love that way. When your partner writes an entry at the end of the day, you want their actual feelings, their clumsy thoughts, even their typos. When a bot starts writing for you, the words feel distant. You are not talking to each other anymore.
The privacy side made it even worse. To be honest, at the time I thought the benefits of AI would outweigh the privacy concerns. But after seeing that generated letter, knowing our private notes had to travel across the internet to an external server felt terrible. I was sending our thoughts to a cloud provider just to get back fake sentences that neither of us wanted.
So when I started version 2.0, I deleted all of it.
Now, Warmth is just a small iPhone app. You write a note, add a photo, and reply to each other. Everything syncs directly through your personal iCloud accounts using Apple's CloudKit. There is no Warmth database, no account to create, and no server in the middle.
Will I ever use AI again in Warmth? Maybe, if I find a good use for it that does not generate feelings for me, and Apple happens to have a good on-device model. But sending private diary entries to third-party AI servers is done.