WarmIntro

Inspiration

Every screen-time app makes you set the limits. Nobody knows their limits in advance.
You always dismiss the alert you configured yourself.
What actually stops a doomscroll is a person. Screen Time has never texted your friend.

What it does

No setup. No limits, no schedules, no blocklists.
Learns your baseline. 14 days of your own sessions per app. "Too long" is relative to you.
Decides every 30 seconds. Stay quiet, nudge you, or escalate to a friend.
Picks the right friend. The one most likely to get through to you at this hour.
Friends pull you out. One tap. Your phone buzzes and the feed stops loading.
Speaks. Nudges play in an ElevenLabs voice, not another silent banner.
Leaderboards. Least scrolling wins. Most focus wins.

How we built it

The agent

A plain function scores each open session fine / drifting / problem from your p50/p90 session length, time of day, and today's total. The model never decides whether something is anomalous.
Claude Opus 5 decides what to do about it and writes the line you read, as structured JSON.
Guardrails are in code, not the prompt: one nudge per 20 min, never escalate before a nudge fails, 2 escalations a day max, never escalate to a friend who is themselves doomscrolling. On any model failure it falls back to a deterministic policy.
Choosing the friend is a bandit. Each friend has a Beta posterior per 4-hour bucket; we Thompson-sample. Outcomes score themselves: did the session end within 5 minutes?

Getting screen time off an iPhone with no paid Apple account

Screen Time APIs need a paid developer account. We had none, so we built two capture paths:
iOS Shortcuts automations — "when Instagram opens/closes, POST here". Exact session boundaries, no App Store.
An encrypted-DNS profile pointing the phone at our own AdGuard Home. That's also what makes a pull-out real: we block that one service for that one phone and the feed stops loading.

Notifications with no Apple account

An installable PWA plus Web Push. Real lock-screen notifications on four iPhones, no App Store, no developer account.

Stack: Python, FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, SQLite · Expo / React Native exported to web · ElevenLabs · AdGuard Home (DNS-over-HTTPS) · nginx + DigitalOcean.

Challenges we ran into

No paid Apple account. Both capture paths above exist because of that one constraint.
We spammed ourselves with ~50 notifications. An escalation with no available friend fell back to a nudge and skipped the cooldown. Now it holds quiet instead.
One duplicate row silently killed the agent. A failed insert rolled back the whole tick, every 5 seconds, for hours. No crash, no alert, just an agent that had stopped thinking.
iOS refuses to play audio a page starts. Our voice nudges generated perfectly and played never.

Accomplishments

Real screen-time capture and real push notifications on stock iPhones, with no paid Apple account and nothing from an App Store.
A pull-out that isn't a suggestion — the feed actually stops.
An LLM in the loop that can't spam you, because every hard limit is enforced around it.

What we learned

Put the model where judgment is needed and nowhere else. Detecting an anomaly is a function. Knowing that 40 minutes at 2am means something different than 40 minutes at lunch is a model.
Every spam bug we had was in our code around the model, not the model.
Platform limits are design input. "No paid Apple account" produced a better idea than the entitlement would have.

What's next

Verified humans as partners, so your accountability partner can't be a bot.
A real time-series database for the minute-level data.
Learn the message that works on you, not just the friend.

Built With

python fastapi sqlalchemy sqlite typescript react-native expo pwa claude anthropic elevenlabs web-push adguard-home dns-over-https ios-shortcuts nginx digitalocean

Try it out

https://nudge.aegist.dev — tap "Continue as guest (demo)". You land in a group with the team (marked "hacker") and can pull us out of our own apps. It really does buzz our phones. Add to Home Screen for notifications.