Dandy

Helps ambitious people turn inspiration into micro-wins and redirecting habitual distraction into achieving those wins. It's permission to live boldly, with proof you're doing it.

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Inspiration

I was inspired to build Dandy after seeing a TikTok where someone shared a year-in-review of all the small wins they’d achieved. They broke down the numbers behind those tiny actions and showed how they compounded into meaningful progress toward their goals.

That stuck with me.

I wanted to build something that helped people intentionally capture those small wins throughout the year - so that they could reflect on them in December. The idea aligned really well with what Gabby had asked for, and Dandy was the result.

What it does

Dandy does two things:

  1. It decomposes large goals into small, repeatable wins
  2. It helps users redirect their attention from habitual distractions to their goals and their micro-wins

How we built it

Dandy is built in pure Swift & SwiftUI using the Composable Architecture & Tuist. It’s 100% native SwiftUI - including:

  • Animations
  • Confetti
  • Haptics
  • Everything else in the UI

I only use three third-party frameworks, one of which is RevenueCat.

I was heavily assisted by LLMs and AI tools, including:

  • Claude Code
  • Codex

A large portion of the app was built by prompting these tools, then manually refining and adjusting where needed.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was demonstrating restraint and keeping focussed on the core purpose of the app. At several points I've had to remove features and refocus the story

The Screen Time API was also mildly annoying to work with, but interesting.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I’m proud that I:

  • Built and shipped a fully native app in 2.5 weeks
  • Created something visually appealing
  • Built something I genuinely want to use myself

What we learned

I learned:

  • A lot about the Screen Time API
  • How Apple’s foundation models work in practice
  • How to integrate Apple Intelligence into an app
  • How to collaborate effectively with LLMs - when to trust them and when to step in manually

What's next for Dandy

Dandy is largely finished.

Next up is preparing it for launch on the App Store. I’m excited to get it ready for distribution and see how people respond to it in the real world.

From there, it's preparing for annual reviews and making even more sharable content.

Built With

  • claude
  • codex
  • swift
  • thecomposablearchitecture
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