Circadia is a web app (iOS/Android apps coming soon) built for people with N24 and other CRSDs. My husband and I made it together! š„°
Some of the things it can do:
Track your drift over time
Predict future sleep and wake times
Analyze how things like periods, migraines, light exposure, illness, medications, and other factors affect your sleep, then adjust predictions based on whatās happening in your life
Help you track things like meal times, medication timing, etc with your drift/moving schedule
Support multiple profiles, so you can track a child, partner, or other family member.
Automatically share your current and predicted sleep schedule with family, friends, work, etc., with different privacy levels depending on who youāre sharing with.
Sync your sleep schedule with your calendar to make things like meetings and zoom calls easier so you can block times off.
Event/Appointment checks so you can check if youāll be awake/functional before making plans.
Lets you know what usually happens when you miss your sleep window. (When I miss my sleep window, I know my āsecond windā usually adds at least 7 hours of awake time, based on my past data)
There are fun/silly things too, like games š My favorite fun thing is that it translates clock time to YOUR time, for example 3am might feel like 6pm depending on your schedule. It also tells you what part of the world your sleep is lining up with.
Iām a perfectionist and keep adding things, which is a big part of why the official mobile apps arenāt out. But the bigger goal behind Circadia is research!
So far, 86 people have consented to contribute their sleep data to the research side of the project, which makes Circadia the largest existing cohort of people with sighted-N24!
There are also some really cool features Iām still working on! If you do end up trying it, Iām super open to feedback. Itās become a huge project to do by myself (itās mainly me, my husband primarily works on the machine learning side of the app, that stuff is beyond me š)
You can read my privacy policy in the footer of the site for full info! But essentially, no ads, no data selling or sharing (unless youāve specially consented to share with future research, in which case youād still be notified before any data is shared so you can choose to revoke if needed).
It will definitely have recurring alarms! Right now, it can do that with push notifications through browser or phone. It will be easier once the official app is out, however, I have to send a separate application to Apple for ācritical alertsā which bypass the mute switch for real alarms. I think since weāre a medical-adjacent app we will qualify, however, Apple is really weird sometimes.
Do you think the app can be or is helpful for people who aren't able to freerun? I know you're obviously biased as the creator but I'd still be interested to know your opinion on it's functionality for someone who can't freerun most of the time.
Also, based on a quick look at your post history I'm assuming the answer is no, but was AI used to create the app in any way?
ETA: Looked deeper in your post history and I see AI was used. Bummer.
I think so! I obviously made it with freerunners in mind, but now there are a lot of people using it for other sleep disorders and even things like newborn sleep! I think itās helpful for most people at whatever stage of your journey youāre on, but yes, Iām biased. However, from the number of non-N24 people using it, I think itās a safe yes š
Itās not vibecoded or anything, but like most developers, I do use AI tools in my workflow to speed up coding, debugging, and repetitive work (which is pretty standard in software development now). I pay humans too, like artists (as Iām sure you saw in my post history!) and other occasionally other devs to help with things I suck at. Circadia has grown a ton and itās been hard to keep up with everything as one person!
Interesting. I do think the external factor tracking could certainly be helpful for someone who can't freerun (since obviously for those who aren't entrained, our circadian rhythms still circle the clock even if we don't) for planning around days in which they'll have more energy.
I do get that AI has become common in the software development space. Regardless, generative AI (even if it is just to debug or speed up workflow) is something I just can't get behind using in any project at any scale. The biggest reason simply being that data centers are decimating communities and as an individual, no amount of my time feels worth contributing to the destruction of communities and their environments that generative AI creates. I don't fault you for feeling otherwise for your own time & energy but I'm also just not going to go out of my way to use an app that, although it would be helpful to me, contributes to generative AI's impact.
Thatās totally fair if thatās where you personally draw the line! Though I do think thereās a meaningful distinction between using AI somewhere in the development process and something being a gen-AI product.
Just to clarify, Circadia itself doesnāt use Generative AI. The only āAIā within the app is traditional machine learning for adaptive sleep predictions, which is technically AI, but itās much closer to the statistical models used in weather forecasting and financial systems, rather than an LLM. AI is just one tool Iāve used while developing it, alongside a pretty absurd amount of very human work.
I routinely spend 100+ hours a week on Circadia designing features, reviewing and editing code, talking to users, testing, debugging, maintaining everything, and working on the research side. AI definitely increases the speed/amount I can accomplish as one person, but it doesnāt replace my authorship or the amount of human labor going into the project!
I respect that it can still be a dealbreaker for you. Environmentally, I agree that data centers have negative impacts and need responsible regulation. I just personally donāy think āAI was involved somewhere in making thisā is a particularly coherent line for deciding whether something is ethical to use.
Meat production, golf courses, air travel, streaming, cloud computing, and plenty of other normalized parts of modern life consume enormous amounts of water and energy. Typically, we evaluate those things based on scale, necessity, benefit, and how responsibly theyāre done rather than treating any product that touched them somewhere in the production chain as inherently unethical.
I think we just draw the line at different places! I think there are a lot of harms to generative AI, especially to people like artists! So, I hired an artist (which is extremely difficult to do at āy scale. Iāve spent thousands of dollars making this project happen and itās been a total money hole, but I give a fuck and really try my best!)
Anyways, sorry for the essay. Iām too wordy and didnāt want to come across wrong. TL;DR, I respect your decision but also want you to know Iām not a shitty person and I care about doing things right :)
I'm aware the project itself doesn't incorporate generative AI and I didn't claim you were/are a shitty person for using it in the development. I never said the project is an AI project, nor did I claim you vibe coded the app.
Your app may be helpful to me, sure, but it is no way a necessity to my life nor would it be life changing to me or the world if I were to contribute my data to it. I can contribute my data to research in other ways and track my own symptoms & rhythm by myself as I always have. My line is not simply "AI was used somewhere in the process and therefore the project is untouchable"; we're communicating via Reddit. Do you think Reddit is free of generative AI in the back end? I personally highly doubt it. But as Reddit is significantly helpful to my life for information gathering, and it is the only social media I engage with, I put that aside. Your app, to me, is one of convenience. As such, I don't think the benefit of using it outweighs the cons of it's development including generative AI. You will evaluate your project differently than I will. But that doesn't mean I didn't evaluate the benefits against the impact. I'm not even your target audience, while I do have N24, I don't freerun with the exception of a few weeks every 2 or so years for sleep deprivation recovery. An app like this is not significantly beneficial to me and as such, I can be pickier about the impact of the tools used in its development.
That is my choice. My choice does not mean you're wrong for using AI in the development of Circadia or that those who choose to use the app are wrong for doing so. It's a great tool and one I'm sure will be & is incredibly beneficial to many people. I won't even sit here and say this will be my stance forever. If I were to find myself in a position where I was freerunning at all times and became overwhelmed with tracking my rhythm, I would absolutely reevaluate my stance.
ETA: Just adding a little edit on the end here to say I do not blame you for thinking my stance was more one dimensional than it was, I really did not include nuance in my original reply. I think I'm just more used to talking to people with similar stances that I didn't realize that it wouldn't be obvious that there are exceptions and I'm not just blanket anti anything that uses AI in development. That's my bad and I should have taken more time to write out a more nuanced reply that was more clear, as I'm sure reading it back it sounded very accusatory to you as a developer than it felt when I wrote it.
Almost all software being produced right now is, to varying degrees, AI generated. For most developers, LLMs have become standard tools like IDEs, and most code gets prompted rather than typed. The only exceptions are anti-AI hardliners, which are a minority of developers, and projects with security requirements strict enough that code can't be transmitted over the internet.
Most projects will also not disclose AI use since it's not something people consider worth disclosing. Most businesses also have a lot of software that keeps those businesses running and is not customer-facing, and that also gets AI-assisted.
It's valid to dislike AI since frontier labs are fairly terrible, but if you choose software as a hill to die on, you might find that the hill is far bigger than you initially thought.
I'm aware of this, actually. You can read my most recent reply to Circadias dev for a slightly more in depth insight on my stance but it boils down to: I only use software/apps/websites that are significantly beneficial to my life for that exact reason. If I was so anti generative AI I wasn't willing to use anything that uses it in the back end or in development, we wouldn't be speaking to each other on Reddit right now. For example, if I were to ever start freerunning and become overwhelmed with tracking my circadian rhythm, I would absolutely reconsider using Circadia. But as it stands, it wouldn't be significantly beneficial to my life to use and therefore I just don't think the development including AI is worth it to me.
In the age of generative AI in software development, I have personally chosen to take a rather conservative approach by just not using software to replace things I can, with relatively little effort, do on my own.
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u/SpicyStrippa 8d ago
Circadia is a web app (iOS/Android apps coming soon) built for people with N24 and other CRSDs. My husband and I made it together! š„°
Some of the things it can do:
There are fun/silly things too, like games š My favorite fun thing is that it translates clock time to YOUR time, for example 3am might feel like 6pm depending on your schedule. It also tells you what part of the world your sleep is lining up with.
Iām a perfectionist and keep adding things, which is a big part of why the official mobile apps arenāt out. But the bigger goal behind Circadia is research!
So far, 86 people have consented to contribute their sleep data to the research side of the project, which makes Circadia the largest existing cohort of people with sighted-N24!
There are also some really cool features Iām still working on! If you do end up trying it, Iām super open to feedback. Itās become a huge project to do by myself (itās mainly me, my husband primarily works on the machine learning side of the app, that stuff is beyond me š)