Reroute
Conrad Booker, Danah Ansari — April 12, 2026
College students have four years to explore, build relationships, and discover who they are outside of a classroom. Most of them spend it on autopilot.
The problem isn't laziness. It's routine. When every day looks the same—same route to class, same lunch spot, same seat at the library—the brain stops actively processing experience. Psychologists call this habituation. The less novel your environment, the faster time subjectively passes. Students aren't just busy; they're disappearing into a loop, and they won't realize it until it's over.
What inspired us
We didn't start with an app idea. Sitting at this hackathon, we realized we couldn't remember what we'd done the week before. Not because nothing happened, but because every day had looked exactly the same.
The science
Research on temporal perception shows that novel stimuli cause denser memory encoding. Routine stimuli leave almost no trace. If subjective experience of time $T$ is proportional to distinct memories $n$ encoded during it:
$$T_{\text{perceived}} \propto \frac{n}{T_{\text{actual}}}$$
Increasing $n$ (novel experiences) makes time feel fuller. Reroute is a tool for increasing $n$.
How it works
Reroute generates a daily personalized intervention called a reroute, powered by Gemini AI. It might be "go study somewhere you've never been" or "take the long way home." The reroute is timed precisely to a real free window in your day (never during class, never too close to bedtime) and delivered via push notification. You complete it by taking a selfie, then reflect at the end of the day. Over time, you build a memory calendar of every day you stepped off the path.
How we built it
SwiftUI for the native iOS frontend, with a neobrutalist design system: hard black shadows, thick strokes, and Public Sans Bold throughout. Node.js/Express backend handles Gemini prompt generation, Google Calendar parsing, and APNs push notification scheduling. Supabase for database and photo storage. Google Sign In and Google Calendar API for auth and schedule context. Gemini AI generates each reroute using the user's location, habits, and free time blocks.
Challenges
APNs scheduling was the hardest part. Since iOS apps can't refresh in the background, all scheduling logic lives server-side. Prompt engineering for Gemini took more iteration than expected; getting interventions that felt specific and local rather than generic required careful context structuring. Building a full neobrutalist design system in SwiftUI under time pressure pushed us to lean on Cursor for scaffolding.
What we learned
The best ideas come from something you've personally felt. Reroute started as a conversation about our own lives. We also learned that AI apps live or die by their prompts. Giving the model rich, personal, structured context is a product design problem as much as an engineering one.
This is a time app, built on the belief that the quality of your college experience isn't determined by how much you do, but by how much of it you actually notice. Get off the path.
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