HushMate

Hushmate lets housemates share quiet hours and nudge each other anonymously when it gets loud. The app delivers the reminder, so nobody has to deal with the awkwardness.

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Inspiration

I've lived with housemates who were louder than average, and as an introvert I never said anything. I'd lie awake while someone was loud in the living room because knocking on their door felt worse than losing sleep. I think a lot of students in dorms and shared rentals can relate, especially in Vancouver, where most people my age rent with roommates. I looked at housemate apps like Flatastic, but they focus on chores and bills, and none of them deal with noise or quiet time. So I wanted something simple: housemates agree on quiet hours up front, and when someone gets loud you can send a nudge that comes from the app instead of from you.

What it does

Hushmate is a web app for housemates. You create a house, invite your housemates, and everyone sets their weekly quiet times. The Schedule shows everyone's quiet times side by side, and the Summary shows who's resting right now, the house's quiet streak, and heads-ups like "coming home late, might make dinner."

If someone is being loud, any housemate can send them a nudge. It arrives as a notification on their phone, worded as a reminder from the app, so it never says who sent it.

It runs in the browser with nothing to install. On iPhone you add it to the Home Screen to get notifications. To make judging easier, there's a demo house with three simulated housemates who have their own schedules, nudge you every few minutes, and respond when you nudge them.

How I built it

I used Claude Code with the Devpost Learn Skill Pack. In the planning steps the AI interviewed me instead of me writing prompts, and my answers turned into a scope, a PRD and a technical spec. I reviewed and approved each one before moving on. They're all in the devpost/ folder.

For the build I connected the skill pack to claude-forge, a Claude Code plugin I made for my own plan-first work. The skill pack split the spec into seven slices, each one something I could try on my phone. For each slice, forge's agents (database, backend, frontend, tester) wrote the code, and the skill pack ran the checks and committed it. I tested the slices on my own phone along the way.

The stack is React and Vite on Vercel, a NestJS API on Fly.io, and Postgres on Supabase with Prisma. Notifications use the Web Push standard, and sign-in is handled by the app itself.

Challenges I ran into

  • Web app or native app. I would have liked a native phone app, but with my time and budget I went with a PWA that runs online. That meant working within what browsers allow, especially on iPhone, where notifications only work after you add the app to your Home Screen.
  • Testing the housemate features. My unit and integration tests passed, but most of the app depends on two or more people using it at once: nudging someone, getting the notification, seeing who's resting. A lot of that still had to be tested by hand, with multiple accounts on different phones.
  • Deciding what to leave out. Using AI made coding much faster, so it was tempting to keep adding features. I think a good hackathon project does one thing well rather than many things halfway, so I kept the focus on the anonymous nudge and cut or postponed anything that didn't support it.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

  • The core idea works the way I pictured it. A nudge sent from one phone shows up as a real notification on another, and nothing in it says who sent it.
  • It's live at hushmate.online, and anyone can try it from a link without installing anything.
  • The demo house gives judges the full experience on their own. The simulated housemates nudge you, reply to your nudges, and the house resets every night.
  • I designed the brand myself, including the name, logo, and a "cozy midnight" look with dark and light mode.
  • Everything I planned for this version got built. All seven slices shipped, and I didn't add features I hadn't planned.

What I learned

Answering questions before writing any code made the project much clearer than I expected. Cutting the idea down to one core feature, the anonymous nudge, made everything else easier to decide. I also learned how much web push differs between browsers, and that testing on real phones early saved me from finding the iPhone problem at the end.

What's next for Hushmate

  • One-off quiet times, like an exam or an interview
  • Email as a backup when notifications are off
  • A native phone app for more reliable notifications

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