Amber

Inspiration

AI made it easy to build small tools, like a shift sheet for a club booth or a dues tracker. Sharing them is still hard. Viewers need accounts, the published version breaks, and every change has to go through the one person who built it. Meanwhile, the group that needs the tool is already talking in a group chat. We wanted to build tools right there.

What it does

Amber lives inside iMessage. Hold the mic and say what your group needs, like "a shift sign-up sheet for our club fair booth, 30-minute shifts." Amber builds it while you watch, and you can preview it privately. Tap Publish and a card drops into the chat. Anyone in the thread can open it as a live web app, and every tool the group has made stays in one list.

How we built it

iOS app and iMessage extension in SwiftUI, with on-device speech
Node + Postgres backend hosted on Railway. Each chat is a "circle," and each member has their own access.
Claude Opus 5 builds new apps, and Sonnet 5 makes quick edits
Every generated app runs in a sandbox that can't see phone numbers

Challenges we ran into

Fitting a full build flow into the small space of an iMessage extension
Getting builds fast enough that people stay in the chat instead of leaving
Running AI-generated code safely when anyone in the chat can open it
Keeping one version of the app, so the preview and live site don't drift apart

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We went from a voice request to a published tool, shared into a real group chat, in about two minutes. It's a working app on TestFlight, not a mockup.

What we learned

The people who use small tools almost never open an editor. The builder isn't the hard part. Getting the other 20 people in the chat to use and change the tool is.