Stanford Car Pool Goblin

Try it yourself

Text the Goblin at +1 (309) 222-6680 (only available on iMessage). Pretend to be a rider asking for a ride to Berkeley or San Francisco tomorrow. Feel free to specify time or other preferences.

The Problem

An Uber from Stanford to SF costs $70. Everyone knows carpooling is the answer: there's even a WhatsApp group for it. But it doesn't work. Ride requests get buried in minutes, matching requires endless back-and-forth, and nobody wants to be the person who asks for gas money or the person who offers $5 and looks cheap. So everyone just opens Uber.

What We Built

Carpool Goblin is an AI agent that lives in your iMessage. You text it "Need a ride to SF tomorrow around 3": no app to download, no account to create. The Goblin, powered by Claude Haiku, parses your request, posts it to a ride board, finds a matching driver, negotiates timing and a fair gas split, and confirms the ride. All over text, in a sassy Gen Z voice that makes the whole thing actually fun.

The Insight

The real problem with carpooling isn't matching: it's social friction. Drivers are happy to give rides if someone chips in for gas, but they don't want to ask. Riders are willing to pay, but they don't want to offer in a public chat and look cheap. The Goblin sits in the middle and handles the awkward negotiation, like a talent agent who brokers the deal so neither side has to. Both people get what they want without the social cost.

What Inspired Us

Two of our three teammates don't drive. We've all been in the Stanford Palo Alto Carpool WhatsApp chat and watched perfectly good ride matches die in a thread because nobody wanted to deal with the coordination. We wanted to solve this once and for all.

How Claude Powers It

Claude Haiku is the Goblin — it parses flexible natural language ("sometime this afternoon," "headed cityward"), runs the negotiation flow between rider and driver, and maintains the personality that makes the experience feel like texting a friend, not filling out a form. We also used Claude Code to build, debug, and deploy the entire app in 3 hours.

Ethics

Carpooling means getting into someone's car, so trust matters. This works at Stanford because the community is tight-knit: you're riding with someone from your section, not a stranger. For production, we'd require .edu email verification and let riders set preferences through the Goblin (driver gender, number of past rides, etc.). The Goblin coordinates but never overrides; both sides confirm before any ride is locked in. People stay in control.