StudyRelay

Inspiration

What it does

How we built it

Challenges we ran into

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we learned

What's next for StudyRelay

An interruption should not erase your place

StudyRelay explores a specific Alexa+ use case: helping a student resume meaningful work after life interrupts a study plan. A checklist remembers the task; StudyRelay also preserves the exact next thought and rebuilds a feasible evening around fixed commitments.

What works

Add tasks, estimates, deadlines, priorities and fixed events. Build a plan. Report completed focus minutes, interruption time and a resume breadcrumb. The real local tools update remaining work and replan without moving protected commitments. In the fictional demonstration, 15 minutes of focus plus a 25-minute interruption moves 19:15 to 19:55 and leaves 135 minutes of work. Shortening the evening exposes 100 unfinished minutes instead of silently claiming completion. Calendar changes require an explicit preview and approval tied to the current workspace revision. Declining changes nothing; changing context invalidates stale proposals. State and breadcrumbs survive reloads. A readable handoff can be exported.

Alexa+ simulated-experience path

This is a working web simulation built with Codex, not a live Alexa integration. The UI invokes actual local MCP tools through Streamable HTTP using protocol 2025-11-25. Planning, validation, persistence and approval logic are real. Alexa interaction and the external calendar are simulated; typed requests use transparent intent patterns, not an undisclosed language model. No Amazon SDK, AWS service, paid API, microphone or device was used.

Built and verified

New work created on 19 October 2026 using Node.js 24 built-in HTTP/filesystem/test modules and browser HTML/CSS/JavaScript. No dependencies or API keys are needed. The public MIT repository includes all source, run instructions, planning notes and an actual friction log. Codex assisted implementation, testing and documentation. 13 automated tests pass, covering scheduling constraints, overload, interruption arithmetic, stale/double approvals, atomic validation, protocol headers, origin checks, private-file boundaries and restart persistence. Browser checks verified planning, interruption, decline, approval, reload and overload. The 72-second captioned video is an edited walkthrough of actual app captures, not a continuous recording.

Design challenge and next step

The key engineering challenge was preventing a plausible-looking calendar preview from becoming an unapproved or stale action. Revision-bound proposals and transactional state keep that boundary explicit. The prototype deliberately uses a deterministic planner so its decisions are inspectable. It is single-user, loopback-only and same-day; it is not production authentication or a claim of complete MCP conformance. No user study or measured productivity improvement is claimed. A future live Alexa/calendar integration would require compatibility, permissions and user testing before any such claim.

Built With

• codex
• css3
• html5
• javascript
• mcp
• node.js