frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Show HN: How Are You-elderly fall detection app I built solo with AI in 6 months

2•sminchev•1h ago
I am writing the post, because I want to show that with AI, really complex and meaningful projects can be done, if the proper tools were used the proper way. I needed a project that I can use, so that I see how far I can go with only AI usage. I needed something doable, but relatively complex. And then I remembered an idea my wife shared with me, a few years ago: an app that monitors her grandfather's behavior and sends a notification if he stops moving. at that time, AI integrations were not considered as an option, and static algorithms to model behavior (with adaptation) were complex and fragile. I am not that smart to implement such thing.

I started in December 2025. I read a lot, watched videos, I found a AI framework that I wanted to try: BMAD. The idea behind it felt known to me. Agile methodology, but with agents. What can go wrong!? I had all I need. A language that I don't know, Android OS, that have changed a lot for the last 15 years , and AI models that I can use to dynamically adapt the behavior changes. A chosen framework. Looked complex enoungh for me. So many unknown things. The only thing I had was my experience in the software development! I needed one week to go through the BMAD worklflow and get all documentations out of it. The main plan was to ask AI to implement the detection of the following concerns: * Unusual stillness (potential fall or medical event) * Did not wake up on time * At an unfamiliar location at an unusual hour * Phone silent for too long

I ended up with the following technical stack:

* Kotlin + Jetpack Compose + Material 3 * Room + SQLCipher for encrypted local storage * Google Gemini for behavioral analysis * Resend API for transactional email alerts * Clean architecture: :domain (pure Kotlin) -> :data -> :ui -> :app

Having the basis known to me and the AI, the next five weeks the dev agents did the implementation.

And when I started testing, ALL FAILED. All was there, but nothing was connected. Like, 20 devs did something without a single daily meeting, ever! I think that, if I tested more in the middle phases, knowing and checking the code regularly , investing more time in the initial BMAD workflow steps, I would have gotten better results. I also tried different models, before sticking permanently to Opus.

I didn't stop. Weeks of testing and fixing. What I learned the hard way: Android dev isn't as enjoyable as it used to be. Every OEM has its own way to kill my 24/7 monitoring With AI and multiple LLMs, I ended up with an 11-layer service recovery system: * Foreground service with IMPORTANCE_MIN channel * WorkManager periodic watchdog * AlarmManager backup chains * BOOT_COMPLETED receiver * SyncAdapter * Batched accelerometer sensing * Exact alarm permission recovery * OEM-specific wakelock tag spoofing * START_STICKY restart * Safety net AlarmClock at 8-hour intervals * User-facing gap detection with OEM-specific guidance And new issues came up every day :D

And here are metrics: 422 prod files, 87k+ lines of prod code, 2251 tests, 53k+ line of testing code.

Was it worth it?! With all the unknowns and mistakes, it took me 6 months. My investment so far is mostly the Claude Max subscription. Old-school, that's 2-3 people for the same 6 months. Would I do it again? Yes. I know what to do now: pick a language I know, test more often, review the code often, write better docs. Use the right tools and LLM. Is the code quality good? Honestly, I don't care. As a PM, I care about fast delivery, low cost, good performance, stability, documentation. If the code were bad, I wouldn't get those. The app shipped and looks stable — so the code is in decent shape. And seeing how Claude Code works, the code is full of comments. Ordinary devs don't document this well. From that angle, the code is excellent!

The website (AI generated) : https://howareu.app/ Any advice, feedback, opinions will be highly appreciated.

Comments

blinkbat•1h ago
does this go on your phone, or do you need a smart watch, or what? did you actually do any physical testing?
sminchev•43m ago
The idea is a children to install it on their parents devices and do nothing more. No smart watch, no need to the parents to frequently click anywhere. Just keep their device with them. I did it that way on purpose. To be as less intrusive as possible. The app stays there and run 24/7 and detect locations, moment of activeness and rest, sleep, and creates behavior patterns. If any of the pattern gets violated, it send a notification. I give an example: my father do a daily walk between 8AM and 10AM. If he misses that one I will receive a notification. If my mother fails on the street and she does not move for some time, I will receive a notification with the exact coordinates.

That simple ;)

blinkbat•1h ago
> Is the code quality good? Honestly, I don't care. > The app shipped and looks stable — so the code is in decent shape

not generally things you want to fuck with when making claims about health or safety.

sminchev•36m ago
:) It will be really stupid from my side to just let it go, without being sure that it will work. I am a professional after all, with almost 20 years of experience. There are 2000+ tests, 50K+ lines of testing code. I tested myself, and a lot of other people tested, with different devices. Covering all cases that we can think of. This is serious project, that I really hope that it will help a lot of people, and I really invested a lot of time and effort to make it stable. I intentionally delayed the push to production with a few weeks, so that I am 99.9% sure that I covered everything.

Of course, we are human after all, and I will highly appreciate every effort and support from others, so that we can make the product do better. :)

renan_warmling•1h ago
I'm also developing solutions with this, and everything will depend on how you contextualize the agents so they understand how your product should work within your market vision. Generating consistent and decent code works, but you need to manually persist (for now) the operational principles and inviolable fundamentals of your program. Bugs will always appear, but the speed of implementation is impressive and, in practice, becomes cheaper than hiring an entire team of developers.
sminchev•1h ago
Yes. you can't just leave it and go somewhere. Constant monitoring is required
smt88•45m ago
Wow, you spent a crazy amount of time on something an experienced dev could hack together in a weekend without AI, and probably as little as a day with Claude Code.

This is like an anti-ad for AI and vibe-coding.

sminchev•33m ago
I doubt. Experience dev can't make 400+ files and write 2000 tests in a weekend. At least, I was never that fast and productive ;)

With my experience, developing android apps in Java, 10-15 years ago, such project would need at least 2 developers, for 5-6 months of development and testing.

Book review: Out of nowhere

https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/out-of-nowhere-the-emergence-of-spacetime-in-theories-of-quantum-grav...
1•hhs•6m ago•0 comments

Modern Rendering Culling Techniques

https://krupitskas.com/posts/modern_culling_techniques/
1•krupitskas•7m ago•1 comments

Why the Stock Market Makes No Sense

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/opinion/wall-street-markets-iran-ai.html
1•2OEH8eoCRo0•9m ago•1 comments

Zero-Copy GPU Inference from WebAssembly on Apple Silicon

https://abacusnoir.com/2026/04/18/zero-copy-gpu-inference-from-webassembly-on-apple-silicon/
1•agambrahma•9m ago•0 comments

Objection: An AI judge for investigating media claims

https://www.objection.ai/press-release
1•hhs•10m ago•0 comments

Review: Machines of Loving Grace

https://jacobbrazeal.wordpress.com/2026/04/18/review-machines-of-loving-grace/
1•tibbar•12m ago•0 comments

See and hear galaxies evolving in new simulations

https://earthsky.org/space/see-and-hear-galaxies-evolving-new-simulations/
1•ganitam•13m ago•0 comments

What I Learned from Setting Up an Online Bookstore with WordPress Plugins

https://www.dilmandila.com/cheap-and-easy-online-bookstore-with-wordpress-plugins/
1•severine•16m ago•0 comments

Monthly Overview for Developer Tools – April 2026

https://semanticed.online/monthly-developer-tools-2026-04
1•alihassaanmug•16m ago•0 comments

Fundamentals of CuTe Layout Algebra and Category-Theoretic Interpretation [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVh_guNbWMA
1•matt_d•17m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Sostactic – polynomial inequalities using sums-of-squares in Lean

https://github.com/mmaaz-git/sostactic
1•mmaaz•19m ago•0 comments

We beat Google's zero-knowledge proof of quantum cryptanalysis

https://blog.trailofbits.com/2026/04/17/we-beat-googles-zero-knowledge-proof-of-quantum-cryptanal...
1•da-bacon•20m ago•0 comments

Homeland Security's New Task Force Website Sanitizes Trump's Deportation Agenda

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/04/homeland-security-task-force-new-website-sanitizes-t...
1•cdrnsf•20m ago•0 comments

What Centuries of Mistakes Can Teach Us About Saving for Retirement

https://archive.is/Eyc7s
2•akyuu•20m ago•0 comments

Inferena: Local benchmark of PyTorch vs. Llama.cpp vs. Rust frameworks

http://inferena.tech/
1•kvark•21m ago•0 comments

HIPPO Turns One Master Password into Many Without Storing Any

https://spectrum.ieee.org/storeless-password-manager
1•u1hcw9nx•22m ago•1 comments

Our Longing for Inconvenience

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/essay/our-longing-for-inconvenience
1•cdrnsf•23m ago•1 comments

David Sklansky, the 'First Nerd to Enter Poker,' Dies at 78

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/11/us/david-sklansky-dead.html
1•indigodaddy•24m ago•0 comments

Launching Ising, open models to accelerate the path to useful quantum computers

https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-launches-ising-the-worlds-first-open-ai-models-to-accel...
3•hhs•24m ago•0 comments

What Is Llms.txt and Does Your Business Need One?

https://semarkglobal.com/blog/what-is-llms-txt-does-your-business-need-one
2•alihassaan•26m ago•1 comments

Dad brains: How fatherhood rewires the male mind

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260417-fatherhood-how-the-male-brain-and-body-prepare-for-ch...
2•tchalla•31m ago•0 comments

Show HN: AWS's Kiro just got an Open source Codex

https://github.com/thabti/kirodex
2•sovietism•34m ago•0 comments

Pupil dilation suggests people start solving before all numbers are in

https://phys.org/news/2026-04-mental-math-shortcut-pupil-dilation.html
2•y1n0•36m ago•0 comments

Classic Papers: Articles That Have Stood the Test of Time

https://scholar.googleblog.com/2017/06/classic-papers-articles-that-have-stood.html
2•gregsadetsky•37m ago•0 comments

Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight

https://www.xda-developers.com/zip-drives-dominated-90s-vanished-almost-overnight/
2•y1n0•41m ago•1 comments

The man who saw the future: the legacy of cultural theorist Mark Fisher

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/apr/17/we-are-making-a-film-about-mark-fisher-capitalist-re...
2•mellosouls•43m ago•0 comments

Robots learn: A brief, contemporary history

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/04/17/1135416/how-robots-learn-brief-contemporary-history/
3•billybuckwheat•44m ago•0 comments

20000 Gates and 20 MIPS [pdf]

https://bitsavers.org/pdf/amdahl/history/20000_Gates_and_20_MIPS_199011.pdf
2•ingve•47m ago•1 comments

Tiny Go and Rust programs appear to start equally fast (on some machines)

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/programming/GoVsRustStartupDelays
2•ingve•55m ago•1 comments

AI writes code 100x faster – why hasn't productivity?

https://deeptils.github.io/blog/ai-writes-code-100x-faster-productivity-hasnt/
2•deeplstm•57m ago•1 comments