When my wife became pregnant in 2023, I did what came naturally to me - I started tracking everything. I made a little Google Sheet with doctor's appointments, symptoms, measurements, milestones. My wife, less inclined toward spreadsheets, humored my obsession with tracking.
Little did I know this was just the beginning.
After our daughter's birth, the tracking intensified. Feeds, diapers, sleep patterns - everything went into increasingly complex spreadsheets. That little Google Sheet started to get bigger and bigger. The formulas and relationships got more and more complex. I spent a lot of time fixing up the formatting and making sure the data was clean.
As the months went by, that little Google Sheet ballooned.
I layered on formulas, stitched together tabs, cleaned up data, and wrestled with formatting. By late 2024, it was a monster of a Google Sheet- and I was struggling to fit it all in my head.
Now I'm not a coder, but I do love figuring things out—so I tried little hacks: copy-pasting snippets, tinkering with add-ons, Googling my way through errors. It worked, but it took a lot of work to make it work.
January 2025 was the turning point.
As Claude Code and Cursor got better and better, I started to use them more and more.
That's when the tracking evolved into building apps.
Not for the public, but just for me to use for myself. Same purpose, but better instruments—and it became possible for a non-coder like me to shape tools around my family.
The Possibilities of Being A Personal Family Developer
So what have I been doing with all these tools?
I've made a suite of family apps. A lot are experiments and not practical. But a few have stuck.
A health tracker where I log our family's habits, medicines, and routines.
A wardrobe tracker which my wife requested: Useful since we have two growing kids.
An inventory tracker, which helps us manage grocery shopping and online ordering.
These are all for internal use and I can keep all our data in one place and customize the views exactly how I want them.
I'm keeping the technical details light here since these apps aren't exactly bulletproof in terms of security. I know the weaknesses of AI development, and I don't want to risk exposing too much. They work fine for our needs, but I wouldn't want to broadcast the specifics. It's all personal stuff anyway - the kind of apps I wish existed, so I built it myself, and not for public release.
I love this possibility - being able to customize anything for my family. Whether it's tracking health data, managing educational resources, or organizing our finances, I can build exactly what we need.
Like when my wife mentioned wanting to track our family's wardrobe, I didn't have to search for "the perfect app." Instead, I thought "I can build that for us."
It's liberating to break free from expensive software subscriptions too. When I saw Mentava charging $500 a month for their "teaching kids to read" app - seriously? That might work for Bay Area salaries, but it's completely out of touch for families like mine in the Philippines. Now instead of being priced out, I can just build our own version.
More than the technical possibilities though, it has opened up some productivity possibilities.
Instead of spending tons of time optimizing my Family Health Google Sheet- I'm able to put something out and tweak it much faster. I can do more for the family this way.
I've become a 10x dad.
What does a 10x dad do?
There's this fascinating story from colonial Vietnam that I think about all the time.
When the French arrived and saw how the Vietnamese were farming, they saw right away that they could introduce new agricultural technology and increase their output. So they brought in tools and fertilizers. They were planning to increase their yields and sell the excess across their empire.
But that's not what happened. Instead, the farmers maintained their usual crop output and used the fertilizer to reduce their work hours. They chose to spend that extra time leisurely- relaxing and spending time with family.
If you want to learn more about it, you can read this.
Those farmers understood something fundamental about productivity that we're still struggling to grasp today.
While today's productivity gurus obsess over maximizing output and efficiency at work, I'm discovering something different: these tools and systems aren't just about getting more done - they're about multiplying the meaningful moments I can spend with my children. That's the real breakthrough.
But there's an important caveat: I genuinely enjoy spending time with my kids.
So that's what I'm optimizing for. How can I use the new AI tools to let me spend 10x time with my kids. From that foundation, the productivity gains stop being about output, and start becoming time and attention I can reallocate toward what actually matters.
Presence Over Productivity
When people worry about AI and productivity gains, they often imagine people will just waste that extra time. But what if "unproductive" time is exactly what we need more of? Time to be present with our loved ones. Time to move our bodies. Time to create art. Time to just... be.
For me, it means transforming a rushed 30 minutes with my kids into 300 minutes of real connection. That's becoming a 10x dad - not doing more, but being more present.