A skill for the ninety seconds before a decision you can't undo.
Most mental health apps are built for afterwards: mood trackers, diary cards, long lists of skills to scroll through later. Some AI ones even tell you not to use them in the moment. But there's a moment in between. Something is building, you haven't acted yet, you're too wound up to read a list, and it isn't a crisis, so calling a hotline feels like too much. I built this for that moment.
This isn't therapy. I checked all 28 skills against the research: 7 have solid evidence, 17 have some, and 3 have very little. That's the honest state of the field. DBT is proven as a full program: weekly therapy, a skills group, months of work with a clinician. Almost no one has tested one skill, on your own, on a phone, in ninety seconds. So every card shows where its technique comes from. Of 118 sources, 90 are confirmed, and the other 28 are clearly labelled as unconfirmed.
Three safety checks run first: crisis, drugs or alcohol, and medical emergency. They're simple word lists, not AI, so they run on your phone even with no signal. They're set to go off easily on purpose. A false alarm just shows a phone number and a way back. Missing a real crisis doesn't get a second chance.
The interface
React + Vite
Installs to your home screen like any other app (a progressive web app). No app store, no account, no sign-up in the way.
First, always
Three safety checks
Crisis, drugs and alcohol, medical emergency. Fixed word lists, identical on the phone and the server. The AI can raise an alarm, but it can never cancel one.
Then, usually
Word matching
If your words clearly point to one skill, it shows up instantly: no waiting, no cost. This is how the live app works.
Only when stuck
Claude Sonnet, behind FastAPI
A backup for messages the word matching can't make sense of. It sits behind the safety checks, and the app works fully without it, which is how it runs live today. It only sees what you typed, never your diary.
Stays with you
On-device storage
Check-ins, the diary and plans stay in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Yours to take
Plain-text export
Export any range of dates as a text file, to look back on or share with a therapist. Plus a full backup, so leaving is as easy as staying.
You type what's going on in your own words. It tells you the feeling makes sense, then gives you one thing to try. Not a list, just one. There are two spaces: a feeling I can't steady (anger, panic, numbness, 3am worry) and an urge I don't want to follow (porn, scrolling, the late-night pull). 28 skill cards in all, each saying what it's for, what to do, and where the technique comes from. No account, and nothing you write leaves your phone.
One rule shapes everything: if you have to pick from a menu or read a wall of text, it has already failed. When you're that wound up you can't think straight, and that's exactly when most apps hand you forty options. Privacy follows the same logic. People type things here they would never say if they thought it was being stored. If it left the phone, they'd write a softer version, and the app can't help with a softer version.
409 automated tests, run against real ways people phrase things, including 49 crisis messages and 23 that must not set anything off. Then eight reviewers each checked one part of the app, and a second reviewer tried to disprove every finding. 65 of 79 held up. The biggest: the crisis check missed everyday phrasing like "i wanna die", and the urge section promised privacy right above a box that sent your text to a server. All fixed. The real lesson: none of it was broken code. The app was promising more than it actually did, which is the worst kind of bug in something people trust at their lowest.
No clinician has reviewed the cards yet, and only two people have tested it. Every phrase the app recognises was written by me or by AI, and real sentences have already slipped past it. The crisis check is a word list, not a screening tool. It doesn't yet handle a second bad moment in the same night, early sobriety, fear of hurting someone else, or being mid-argument. What it gives you for now: the skills, and a record that's yours to keep.
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